January 10, 2023 | Chris Aldrich

Full RSS feeds for Mastodon Instances with OpenRSS

I’ve wanted full RSS feeds for several Mastodon instances for ages.

They can be particularly useful for small instances (aka communities) with slow posting velocity—you know, that instance you wanted to join for the local camaraderie, but having/maintaining/maintaining yet another Mastodon account wasn’t worth it, the hashtag discovery wasn’t going to cut it, and trying to follow all the people in the local community individually is irksome. Well OpenRSS.org might be able to cover you.

As an example, I wanted to follow what’s happening at toolsforthought.rocks/public/local so I added that slightly trimmed local timeline URL onto https://openrss.org/ and put it into my feed reader. After they wire things together for you a bit (presuming it’s one they’ve not seen/done before), voilà your RSS feed just starts working! Now I’m following ToolsForThought at: https://openrss.org/toolsforthought.rocks/public/local.

Since my personal website works with Mastodon and the Fediverse, this last part of more easily following groups of people in my social reader helps me complete the circle of reading, following, and responding in a more IndieWeb way. (Of course I wish that Mastodon 4.0 had not gone full js;dr, which would have allowed following them using Microformats mark up with much better fidelity. le sigh)

Reposted a post by

Geoff Cain (@geoffcain@mastodon.social) (Mastodon)

The Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education, a great (1400+ pages!) resource on elearning has been released as an openly licensed book. Great essays in here on learning theories - I will write more as I get through this, but it looks some of the most interesting writers/researchers on elearning are well represented here. Pay a lot for the print copy or download it free as a pdf. https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-19-2080-6

Replied to a post by

Ryan Randall (hcommons.social)

Slowly customizing my site layout enough to get it to validate h-entry info according to this nifty tool: https://indiewebify.me Wow, do I teach myself best by exploring other examples. #blogging #indieWeb

@ryanrandall @natalie I’m seeing more HCommons folx looking at #IndieWeb, so I’ll mention that I’ve got several IndieWeb friendly sites including on #WordPress as does @KFitz, who I think has also been experimenting with static sites lately. If you need support, there’s a great and helpful community you’ll find at https://chat.indieweb.org for all your questions. You might find some useful tidbits and examples at https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education as well.

Replied to How to Set up and Maintain Your Academic Reading List in Obsidian by Natalie Kraneiss (Field Notes)

The combination of Zotero (with the Better BibTeX plugin) and Obsidian with the Citation and Projects plugins are the perfect way for me as a PhD student to keep track of the literature to be read and already read.

This is excellent! I’d already had the majority of it set up and I was going to spend some time this week to write some custom code with Dataview to do this, but apparently there’s a reasonably flexible plugin that will get me 95% of what I’m sure to want without any work! Thanks Natalie.

Incidentally, I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at S.D. Goitein’s note taking process (zettelkasten) in his work on the Cairo Geniza, specifically with respect to:

Zinger, Oded. “Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza: A Practical Guide to Collections, Editions, and Resources.” Jewish History 32, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-019-09314-6.

Princeton Geniza Lab. “Goitein’s Index Cards,” 2022. https://genizalab.princeton.edu/resources/goiteins-index-cards.

Bookmarked Return to Blogging by Christopher Long (cplong.org)

A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media.