A Crowded Stream
As a result of owning all this data, my blog/site has become MUCH more active than it had been before. (It’s also been interesting to see just how much data I’d been giving to social media sites.) This extra activity has caused a few to tip me off that they’re seeing a lot of email notifications and additional material in their RSS feeds that they’re not used to seeing (and may not necessarily care about). So rather than risk them unsubscribing from everything and allow them to receive what they’re used to seeing, I’ve spent some time in the last couple of days to work on my IndieWeb Commitment 2017 which was to:
Fix my site’s subscription/mail functionality so that I can better control what current subscribers get and allow for more options for future subscribers.
Because a lot of the recent additions to my site have been things like owning all my Instagram posts, my bookmarks, what I’m watching, updates about books I’m reading, and links to everything I’ve been reading online, I’ve been using a category on the site called “Social Stream” with each of these posts as sub-categories. In most cases, social stream could be synonymous with microblog to some extent though it covers a broader range of content than just simply Twitter-like status updates.
Filtering Social Stream Posts out of My Email Subscriptions
I added a filter in my functions.php file for the JetPack-based plugin that prevents my site from emailing those who have used the JetPack subscription service from receiving emails for each and every post in those categories.
I had previously been preventing some of these emails from firing on a manual basis, but with their increased frequency, it was becoming unsustainable.
For those interested, the code and some useful tips can be found at the JetPack site. A copy of the specific code I’m currently using in my functions.php file appears below:
add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories', 'exclude_these' );
function exclude_these( $categories ) {
$categories = array( 'social-stream');
return $categories;
}
More Flexible RSS Feeds and Discovery
For future subscribers, I wanted to allow some easier subscription options, particularly when it comes to RSS. Fortunately WordPress does a pretty good job of not only providing RSS feeds but makes them relatively configurable and customizeable with good documentation. [1] [2]
Custom URLs for RSS Syndication and .htcacess Modifications
I wanted to create a few human-readable RSS feed names and feeds including:
- www.boffosocko.com/articles.xml
- www.boffosocko.com/microblog.xml
- www.boffosocko.com/instagram.xml
- www.boffosocko.com/linkblog.xml (things I’ve bookmarked or read)
- www.boffosocko.com/read.xml
- www.boffosocko.com/math.xml
- www.boffosocko.com/informationtheory.xml
With somewhat canonical feed URLs, I can always change where they point to in the future. To do this and have them map over into the actual feeds for these things, I did a bit of remapping in my .htaccess file based on some thoughts I’d run across recently. The code I used appears below:
# BEGIN rss
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ "/feed?cat=-484"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^microblog\.xml$ "/feed?cat=484"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^articles\.xml$ "/feed?kind=article"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^instagram\.xml$ "/feed?cat=936"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^linkblog\.xml$ "/feed?cat=964,945"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^read\.xml$ "/feed?cat=945"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^math\.xml$ "/feed?cat=10"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^informationtheory\.xml$ "/feed?cat=687"[L,R]
RewriteCond %{Query_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^feed$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]
</IfModule>
# END rss
Each of the cat=### are the numbers for the particular category numbers I’m mapping within WordPress for the associated category names.
RSS Feed Pattern for IndieWeb Post Kinds Plugin
I also spent a few minutes to figure out the RSS feed patterns to allow for the additional feeds provided by the Post Kinds plugin to work. While Post Kinds is similar to the native WordPress post formats, it’s designed particularly with IndieWeb posts in mind and uses a custom taxonomy which also wraps particular post kinds in the appropriate microformats automatically. The general form for these RSS feeds would be:
Other feeds could be constructed similarly by replacing “article” with the other kinds including: bookmark, favorite, jam, like, listen, note, photo, read, recipe, reply, repost, watch, and wish. I suspect that most will only want the articles while those who are really interested in the others can either “build” them themselves for subscribing, or given the sporadic nature of some, they would more likely be interested in the “social stream” feed noted above.
Discoverability
Finally there’s the most important question of what feed readers like Feedly or Woodwind can actually discover when someone searches for an RSS feed on my domain. It’s one thing to have customized feeds, but if feed readers can’t easily find them, the subscriber is never likely to see them or know they exist to want to consume them. Most advanced feed readers will parse the headers of my site for discover-able feeds and present them to the user for possible subscription.
Out of the box WordPress provides two RSS feeds as standard: one for posts (essentially everything) and one for comments. I added several additional ones (like those mentioned above), which I thought might be most requested/useful, into my page header to provide a slightly broader range of subscription options. I even included a few feeds for alternate sites I run, like my WithKnown-based site. I suppose if I wanted I could advertise feeds for my favorite sites anywhere.
To add these additional feeds, I added several additional lines into my page header similar to the following example which makes my posts categorized or tagged as mathematics discoverable:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Mathematics Feed" href="http://boffosocko.com/math.xml" />
Wrap up
Hopefully with these few simple changes, those who wish to subscribe to my blog by email won’t be inundated with a lot of the social details. Those who want all or even smaller portions of my feed can consume them more easily, and there’s a way to be able to consume almost anything you’d like by category, tag, or post format/post kind.
Now on to my stretch goal:
Finish my monthly email newsletter
Comments/Questions?
Is there a particular type of content I’m creating here that you’d like to subscribe to? Let me know in the comments below if there’s a feed of a post format/kind, category, or tag you’d like to have that isn’t mentioned above.
whoa, does twitter not t.co every URL in tweets?
whoa, does twitter not t.co every URL in tweets?
This Article was mentioned in IndieWeb and Journalism | boffosocko.com
Some thoughts about how journalists could improve their online presences with IndieWeb principles along with a mini-case study of a site that is employing some of these ideas.
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Jeremy, Like you, I had some of the same issues and questions when I first started. I’d had a primary website for a while that was a bit more blog-ish on WordPress with a few other subsidiary sites for work related things. When I got into IndieWeb, WithKnown had a great plug-and play set up for almost everything, so for me, it made a nice easy place to start. I also wanted to play with Known and use it to get my feet wet. I was particularly interested in owning a lot of the shorter form posting/microblogging like Twitter without overwhelming my prior subscribers on my WordPress blog with a lot of shorter “fluff”. Once I’d gotten a few things working, Known was also incredibly good at quick short posts using bookmarklets (or this mobile solution I’d come up with: http://stream.boffosocko.com/2016/sharing-from-the-indieweb-on-mobile-android-with-apps-and ). Initially the big difference between my sites was where I stored longer form content and shorter form.
Slowly over time, as I’ve been adding bits and pieces here and there to my WordPress set up, it has been owning more and more while somewhat less lives on my Known Install. There’s also been a huge amount of community development on the WordPress side, so that it’s tremendously better now than it was when I started and continues to grow. I think I hit a bigger turning point after IndieWebCamp LA when I was able to work out a bit more about how I want to own and syndicate things from my primary hub (on WordPress). (See also: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ which has some thoughts about adding RSS feeds from one site to cover multiple other sites). The nice part about owning your own site is that you get to figure out what to do with it and you can literally do almost anything. For example, very shortly I’m about to attempt to own all of my checkins on my WordPress site instead of on Known as I’ve got almost all the moving pieces to do it in a way I like.
Ultimately, I’d recommend doing what works best for you at the moment as there are literally hundreds/thousands of ways to pull it off. Do things one at a time in small bite-sized chunks until you have it the way you want it. There’s no reason to do everything all at once. Sometimes I’ve found that creating posts literally by hand in raw html has been a great way to start to see both how it looks/works, and then use that experience to figure out how to best/most easily automate it going forward.
I’ll also note that my coding skills were old and rusty and have been slowly getting better over time as each piece evolves. Another nice part of the process is that you’ll have a chance to see how others are doing things with examples from the wiki to help you figure out what might work best for you. Over the process I’ve also seen others stop, change gears, and even platforms, and try out something totally different. The key seems to be to start with something you know and begin working from there based on your particular “itches” and needs [http://indieweb.org/itches%5D. Document in the wiki pages what works for you and what doesn’t and why to help others along the way. What works for you won’t necessarily be the best solution for others and vice-versa, but there’s lots of examples out there to work off of.
Your post was certainly a good start for taking stock of what you’ve got and where you might like to go. Now just make a list of your itches and do things a step at a time. I know there’s an IndieWeb Cat [https://indiewebcat.com/%5D and an IndieWeb Library [http://boffosocko.com/2016/07/16/the-indieweb-ified-library/%5D, so I’m glad to think that there might be some IndieWeb bread out there soon too. (This reminds me that I want to get back to microformats for recipes again in relation to JetPack’s shortcode work: https://jetpack.com/support/shortcode-embeds/).
Good luck!
I’m using a relatively standard WordPress set up with a handful of relatively standard “alternate” feeds advertised in my site , but Feedly doesn’t seem to be discovering them. I’d set it up in December (discussion here: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ ) and I recall Feedly found the alternate feeds at the time. Has Feedly changed the way it finds alternate feeds?
If it helps to troubleshoot, my site is at http://www.boffosocko.com. And at the moment Feedly seems to only find the first (and canonical WordPress) feed, but none of the other half a dozen or so which are primarily defined to create subsets of the original RSS feed based on categories or tags using typical WordPress methods. (Kudos by the way on apparently getting rid of the bug that defaulted to finding WordPress comments feeds first instead of the primary feed.)
For some reason, the old Feedly bookmarklet I use (is this still supported as I don’t see it on the feedly site anymore) will work for most sites to add fees, but doesn’t redirect properly to add mine instead the url indicates that it finds my json/oembed alternate link: https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed/http://boffosocko.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fboffosocko.com%2F&format=xml
and then reports that no feed was found.
Using my direct URL in Feedly.com search appears to work as does the chrome Feedly mini, though they both only seem to find the primary feed and none of the other alternates as I would expect?
Thanks in advance for any hints or advice to fix this!
Colin and David, I’ve been a long time Feedly user myself and certainly feel your pain. (And in particular, I’m a bit irked that I can’t seem to get Feedly to discover alternate RSS Feeds being broadcast from my site to provide consumers with more options about what content they’d like to consume from my site, see also: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ )
While slowly hacking away at IndieWeb philosophies, one of the big issues I’ve always hated was using an outside feed reader that wasn’t directly integrated into my own site. I’ve played around a lot with woodwind.xyz which has some great IndieWeb features, but doesn’t have the massive developer team behind it that Feedly does.
Recently while doing some alternate research I also came across the WordPress plugin PressForward that was originally designed for journalists and academics, but in short is actually a built-in RSS feed reader that you can self-host as part of your WordPress install. I’ve been loving its general functionality and also use it somewhat like a self-hosted version of Pocket/InstaPaper as well, so it serves multiple uses. While it may not have everything that Feedly does, it’s incredibly functional, and better, it’s open on Github with lots of documentation, so you could potentially add the features you want. I’ve written a bit more about it (including some useful links) here if you’d like to explore it a bit more: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/
Like both of you, I’m always eager to hear of other options should you come across them.
Doing my part to fix the internet by Kimberly Hirsh
Kimberly, Congratulations and welcome to the #indieweb! Interestingly, I’m seeing your post via Superfeedr piped into an IRC channel on freenode rather than webmention to my own site (since upgrading to the most recent version of Webmention for WordPress, I apparently need to re-enable exotic webmentions to my homepage).
I’m amazed that such a short comment that I wrote on my site back in November (and syndicated manually to another’s) should not only crop up again, but that it could have had such an influence. Further, the fact that there’s now a method by which communication on the internet can let me know that any of it happened really warms my heart to no end. As a counter example, I feel sad that without an explicit manual ping, Vicki Boykis is left out of the conversation of knowing how influential her words have been.
Kimberly, I’m curious to know how difficult you found it to set things up? A group of us would love to know so we can continue to make the process of enabling indieweb functionality on WordPress easier for others in the future. (Feel free to call, email, text, comment below, or, since you’re able to now, write back on your own website–whichever is most convenient for you. My contact information is easily discovered on my homepage.)
If it helps to make mobile use easier for you, you might find Sharing from the #IndieWeb on Mobile (Android) with Apps an interesting template to follow. Though it was written for a different CMS, you should be able to substitute WordPress specific URLs in their place:
Template examplesLike: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=like&kindurl=@urlReply: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=reply&kindurl=@url
You might also find some useful functionality hiding at WordPress Bookmarklets for Desktop if you haven’t come across it yet.
As someone who works in academic circles and whose “” on my site either, to help people more easily subscribe to subsets of data from my site more easily, I did a few things I’ve documented here: RSS Feeds. Additionally, choosing what gets syndicated to other sites like Twitter and Facebook rounds out the rest.
There are a number of other folks including myself using their sites essentially as commonplace books–something you may appreciate. Some of us are also pushing the envelope in areas like hightlights, annotations, marginalia, archiving, etc. Many of these have topic pages at Indieweb.org along with examples you might find useful to emulate or extend if you’d like to explore, add, or extend those functionalities.
If you need help to get yourself logged into the indieweb wiki or finding ways to interact with the growing community of incredibly helpful and generous indeweb people, I am (and many others are) happy to help in any way we can. We’d love to hear your voice.
Syndicated copies to:
Kimberly, Congratulations and welcome to the #indieweb! Interestingly, I’m seeing your post via Superfeedr piped into an IRC channel on freenode rather than webmention to my own site (since upgrading to the most recent version of Webmention for WordPress, I apparently need to re-enable exotic webmentions to my homepage).
I’m amazed that such a short comment that I wrote on my site back in November (and syndicated manually to another’s) should not only crop up again, but that it could have had such an influence. Further, the fact that there’s now a method by which communication on the internet can let me know that any of it happened really warms my heart to no end. As a counter example, I feel sad that without an explicit manual ping, Vicki Boykis is left out of the conversation of knowing how influential her words have been.
Kimberly, I’m curious to know how difficult you found it to set things up? A group of us would love to know so we can continue to make the process of enabling indieweb functionality on WordPress easier for others in the future. (Feel free to call, email, text, comment below, or, since you’re able to now, write back on your own website–whichever is most convenient for you. My contact information is easily discovered on my homepage.)
If it helps to make mobile use easier for you, you might find Sharing from the #IndieWeb on Mobile (Android) with Apps an interesting template to follow. Though it was written for a different CMS, you should be able to substitute WordPress specific URLs in their place:
Template examples
Like: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=like&kindurl=@url
Reply: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=reply&kindurl=@url
You might also find some useful functionality hiding at WordPress Bookmarklets for Desktop if you haven’t come across it yet.
As someone who works in academic circles and whose “” on my site either, to help people more easily subscribe to subsets of data from my site more easily, I did a few things I’ve documented here: RSS Feeds. Additionally, choosing what gets syndicated to other sites like Twitter and Facebook rounds out the rest.
There are a number of other folks including myself using their sites essentially as commonplace books–something you may appreciate. Some of us are also pushing the envelope in areas like hightlights, annotations, marginalia, archiving, etc. Many of these have topic pages at Indieweb.org along with examples you might find useful to emulate or extend if you’d like to explore, add, or extend those functionalities.
If you need help to get yourself logged into the indieweb wiki or finding ways to interact with the growing community of incredibly helpful and generous indeweb people, I am (and many others are) happy to help in any way we can. We’d love to hear your voice.
Syndicated copies:
oms i’m getting stuck in twitter canoes and people don’t even notice because the @-mentions are hidden now
@johnjohnston I suspect @mrkrndvs is talking about multiple content types and making subsets easier to subscribe to http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/
Great post. Lots to think about and implement. At the mo my own site only std posts and status. Bookmarks to pinboard etc. Lots to do.
I was actually referring to a presentation from @t youtu.be/FNr0JNwsLy8 where he gave the example of posting (and rejecting) comments etc
I think that the premise was that with #indieweb you have control over what is shown in/on your space and how
As my #indieweb comments go to spam (not sure why, but they do) when I manually accept them I choose not to post the ‘likes’ and ‘RTs’
This post is really useful. My solution had been to have multiple spaces. However, this provides a means of having multiple RSS’s instead
@ricmac @davewiner I’ve got so much stuff in my feed I’ve tried to dice it up; surely no one wants it all.http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/
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The IndieWeb movement is all about having a place on the Web that you own and control. As Chris Aldrich put it in his excellent introduction to the IndieWeb, “wouldn’t it be better if you had a single website that represented you online?” From the point of view of content creation, there’s no question that posting on your own website is the best way to control your content. But what about consuming content? There are still unresolved issues with that, which I’ll explore in this post.
Content consumption is an issue due to the sheer volume of content now pouring out of blogs, particularly those in the IndieWeb community. Much of it is content that doesn’t necessarily have value to anyone but the person posting it. I’m thinking of things like check-ins, RSVPs and bookmarks. Do I really want to know that you’ve checked into a cafe, followed by another post thirty minutes later announcing you’re at the gym? Not really.
There are a couple of ways this type of content can be filtered.
Feed reader filters
Firstly you, the reader, could do it yourself through a feed reader like Inoreader. The pro version of Inoreader allows you to filter text, with a feature called “Rules.” You can choose to either display posts that include a certain word, or exclude all posts with that word. There isn’t a direct way to filter out entire classes of content, like check-ins. However you could manage it by filtering out words like “check-in,” “Foursquare,” and so on. Overall, you can get fairly granular with Inoreader’s rules, including with regular expressions.
As an example, say I only want to see articles in RollingStone.com about the band Weezer. If so, I’d create the following rule:
That test seemed to work well (and yes, the Vic Mensa article did include a reference to Weezer):
There are some restrictions on how much filtering you’re allowed to do with Inoreader:
But these limits seem reasonable. In terms of cost, you’re allowed 30 rules with the US$29.99/year subscription, and unlimited rules for US$49.99/year. Free users get no rules, but again that’s fair. Content filtering is a feature worth paying for.
The other feed reader I use, Feedly, has only just introduced content filtering into its Pro version. “Mute Filters” allow you to “fine-tune your feeds by hiding mentions of unwanted topics or keywords.”
I immediately made use of this new feature by filtering out any mention of the current US President.
Mute Feeds is a nice addition to Feedly Pro and has a slick design. But it’s clearly not as powerful as Inoreader’s filtering. For example, there’s no easy way to filter out everything except for Weezer in RollingStone.com. Also you are only allowed up to 25 Mute Filters with a Feedly Pro subscription, which costs US$45 per year. So you don’t get as much bang for your buck on Feedly.
Filtering at the source
The second way to better control your content consumption is mostly dependent on the source: subscribing to pre-filtered RSS feeds. Once again, Chris Aldrich is showing the way. He offers a number of topic-specific RSS feeds, for example one with just his math-related posts. For IndieWeb bloggers wanting to emulate this, Chris wrote a post with details.
Conclusion
Offering topic-specific feeds is a great idea and, personally, I’d like to see the IndieWeb community focus a bit more on that. I’m all for owning all your content, but that doesn’t mean all of it is suitable for public consumption.
That said, it makes the most sense for users to control content filtering directly. Which means it’s ultimately up to feed readers to provide that service. Both Inoreader and Feedly allow filtering, although Inoreader currently has the most powerful one of the two. Of course there may be other feed readers that offer content filtering as well.
Let us know your thoughts on information overload in blogging and how to filter it.
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<em>Related</em>
I’ve spent part of the day cleaning up some of my checkin data on my website. As I was going through I realized a quirky error had duplicated many and was somehow stripping out additional photos.
There was also another code error which was mixing many of the checkins into my longer form articles. I’ve got a temporary fix, but need to create a filter to fix things longer term. While fixing it, I couldn’t help hearing the haunting words of Richard MacManus who recently said “…I certainly don’t want a bunch of other peoples’ checkins clogging up my feed reader.” Though I’ve spent some time trying to split out content types, I can’t help but think he was referring specifically to me. Sorry Richard!
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
@pomeranian99 you might be interested in this post from @ChrisAldrich on RSS boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss…
With the potential demise of social media, does this offer a possible rebirth of blogging communities and the standards they are built upon?
There is something wrong with social media. Responding to John Lancester’s article in the London Review of Books, Alan Levine suggests that the only response is to exit Facebook. For Duckduckgo, the issue is the 75% of the top sites incorporate Google trackers. Nicholas Carr heralds a new era where we will depend on third-party security support, an era where even thinking is automated. Writing about the disempowering nature of Twitter, Kris Shaffer argues that the answer is not simply moving to Mastadon.
For some the answer is about going ‘old school’, a blogging Renaissance. Oddly, there seems to be a push in some communities for subscribers and email newsletters. This is done by adding sign ups that pop out of posts (even if you have already signed up). If we are to truly have a rebirth though then the technology that I think we need to reinvest in is RSS.
Short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, RSS is a standard that allows users to receive updates to content without the need to manually check or be in fear of missing something due to an inconspicuous algorithm working in the background. As David Nield explains,
Usually this feed is built from the web address. If not shown on the site, tools like the Connected Courses Magic Box can be used to capture it. Some platforms, such as WordPress, also allow you to create a custom feed based on a particular tag or category. You do this by selecting the particular tag or category and adding ‘/feed’ to the end of the URL. Useful if wanting to follow just a particular topic. Although feeds themeselves can be adjusted, this is done in the backend.
To sort through ‘everything’, you use a news aggregator, such as Feedly, Digg Reader or Tiny Tiny RSS. These applications allow you to collect a number of feeds in the one place. These feeds are stored as an OPML file, a format designed to exchange outline-structured information.
As a side note, these applications each have their own features and affordances. For example, Feedly now restricts new users to 50 feeds before asking for payment.
There are a number of ways to develop and edit an OPML file. You can use an OPML generator to build an outline or use an editor to refine a pre-existing list shared by somebody else. Something useful when downloading the public links from a WordPress site. You do this by adding ‘/wp-links-opml.php’ to the end of the URL.
I am not sure whether social media will go away, but with the questions being asked of it at the moment, maybe it is time for a second coming of blogs, a possible rewilding of edtech. The reality is that technology is always changing and blogging is no different. Whatever the future is, standards such as RSS and OPML will surely play there part. So what about you? Do you have any other alternatives to social media and the challenges of our time? As always, comments welcome.
If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.Share this:EmailRedditTwitterPocketTumblrLinkedInLike this:Like Loading…
Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
Aaron, some excellent thoughts and pointers.
A lot of your post also reminds me of Bryan Alexander’s relatively recent post I defy the world and to go back to RSS.
I completely get the concept of what you’re getting at with harkening back to the halcyon days of RSS. I certainly love, use, and rely on it heavily both for consumption as well as production. Of course there’s also still the competing standard of Atom still powering large parts of the web (including GNU Social networks like Mastodon). But almost no one looks back fondly on the feed format wars…
I think that while many are looking back on the “good old days” of the web, that we not forget the difficult and fraught history that has gotten us to where we are. We should learn from the mistakes made during the feed format wars and try to simplify things to not only move back, but to move forward at the same time.
Today, the easier pared-down standards that are better and simpler than either of these old and and difficult specs is simply adding Microformat classes to HTML (aka P.O.S.H) to create feeds. Unless one is relying on pre-existing infrastructure like WordPress, building and maintaining RSS feed infrastructure can be difficult at best, and updates almost never occur, particularly for specifications that support new social media related feeds including replies, likes, favorites, reposts, etc. The nice part is that if one knows how to write basic html, then one can create a simple feed by hand without having to learn the mark up or specifics of RSS. Most modern feed readers (except perhaps Feedly) support these new h-feeds as they’re known. Interestingly, some CMSes like WordPress support Microformats as part of their core functionality, though in WordPress’ case they only support a subsection of Microformats v1 instead of the more modern v2.
For those like you who are looking both backward and simultaneously forward there’s a nice chart of “Lost Infractructure” on the IndieWeb wiki which was created following a post by Anil Dash entitled The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media. Hopefully we can take back a lot of the ground the web has lost to social media and refashion it for a better and more flexible future. I’m not looking for just a “hipster-web”, but a new and demonstrably better web.
The Lost Infrastructure of the Web from the IndieWeb Wiki (CC0)Some of the desire to go back to RSS is built into the problems we’re looking at with respect to algorithmic filtering of our streams (we’re looking at you Facebook.) While algorithms might help to filter out some of the cruft we’re not looking for, we’ve been ceding too much control to third parties like Facebook who have different motivations in presenting us material to read. I’d rather my feeds were closer to the model of fine dining rather than the junk food that the-McDonald’s-of-the-internet Facebook is providing. As I’m reading Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Distraction, I’m also reminded that the black box that Facebook’s algorithm is is causing scale and visibility/transparency problems like the Russian ad buys which could have potentially heavily influenced the 2017 election in the United States. The fact that we can’t see or influence the algorithm is both painful and potentially destructive. If I could have access to tweaking a third-party transparent algorithm, I think it would provide me a lot more value.
As for OPML, it’s amazing what kind of power it has to help one find and subscribe to all sorts of content, particularly when it’s been hand curated and is continually self-dogfooded. One of my favorite tools are readers that allow one to subscribe to the OPML feeds of others, that way if a person adds new feeds to an interesting collection, the changes propagate to everyone following that feed. With this kind of simple technology those who are interested in curating things for particular topics (like the newsletter crowd) or even creating master feeds for class material in a planet-like fashion can easily do so. I can also see some worthwhile uses for this in journalism for newspapers and magazines. As an example, imagine if one could subscribe not only to 100 people writing about #edtech, but to only their bookmarked articles that have the tag edtech (thus filtering out their personal posts, or things not having to do with edtech). I don’t believe that Feedly supports subscribing to OPML (though it does support importing OPML files, which is subtly different), but other readers like Inoreader do.
I’m hoping to finish up some work on my own available OPML feeds to make subscribing to interesting curated content a bit easier within WordPress (over the built in, but now deprecated link manager functionality.) Since you mentioned it, I tried checking out the OPML file on your blog hoping for something interesting in the #edtech space. Alas… Perhaps something in the future?
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<em>Related</em>
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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A reflection on using my own blog to reclaim my bookmarks and then syndicate them to other sites, such as Twitter and Diigo.
My one word this year is intent. For me this means many things, one of which is to consider my digital presence. In a post reflecting on Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to fix Facebook, Doc Searls says that one of the lessons learnt is that we all live digital lives now:
For me, a part of ‘understanding it’ is in reclaiming some of the processes that have been outsourced to third-party platforms. This does not always mean leaving silos completely, but rather not being dependent on them so that if the door shuts or the terms of use change, there is no concern in having to leave. See for example the recent announcement that Storify is shutting down. One recent attempt I have been tinkering with is an effort to reclaim my bookmarks.
Capturing the Web with Radio3
I have been using Diigo for quite a few years. My workflow has gone through a number of iterations, such as emailing links to batch processing favourited sites. This has largely been dependent on my mobile operating system. For example, I have found the Android Diigo app a lot easier to share to than iOS. (Things may have since changed though). My frustration though was that I was completing a number of steps separately.
After exploring the features and affordances of Google+, I came upon Dave Winer’s Radio3 Linkblog, which allows you to push links out to various platforms, whilst also maintaining your own RSS. It involves selecting a site or quote and clicking on the bookmarklet to generate the short post. The creation of a separate feed provides the means to automate processes with IFTTT. This includes saving links to Diigo.
The problem I have with this process is that although I have an archive of my tweets and links via Diigo, I am dependent on these platforms for maintaining an archive of my linkblog. I trialed using an IFTTT recipe to create a weekly digest as well as the built in option to Diigo, however I was not satisfied with any of these solutions. One problem I faced was the inconsistency of the RSS feed produced by Radio3.
I have found that if I save a link with the bookmarklet without selecting any text, there would be no title included in the feed, even if I added or adjusted the description included in the textbox. Whereas, if I highlighted a chunk of text, the title is added. I guess the workaround would be to select the heading if there is nothing specific I wish to highlight? This seems a strange thing to complain about in regards to one of the forefathers to RSS and probably shows a lack of awareness on my behalf for how Radio3 works.
Another frustration with using Radio3 to send links to Diigo is that I really like capturing quotes when I save links. This is something that I have done for a while and one of the reasons that I like Radio3. I could not figure out how to bring these into the description in Diigo consistently, let alone as annotations. I even took to annotating the quotes with the Diigo browser extension. I wonder if Zapier would do a better job, but until I fork out the money for a paid subscription I am not going to know.
In the end, I could probably make Radio3 work for me. Probably deploying a script to collect everything, as Tom Woodward does with Pinboard, but I feel that I am almost doing that manually with the creation of my newsletter. I just feel apprehensive moving forward depending upon something held together by Dave Winer’s very good will. If it were open sourced, this may be different, but it is not.
Collecting Bookmarks
The next step then in my bookmarking journey has been to test out the idea of saving links on my own site and then syndicating them elsewhere. I have been exploring various post kinds lately, however yet to tinker with bookmarks.
One of the inital challenges was how to syndicate. Like most, I had installed –Jetpack and used that to publicise to various social media sites. This is a relatively easy process where you activate the various connections by giving permissions. However, Jetpack is limited in what sites it supports. There is no option to connect with Diigo.
I therefore installed the Social Network Austo-Poster (SNAP) plugin. Although I could generate a custom feed based on my bookmarks and use this with IFTTT, I would prefer to do something within my own site. One of the differences between SNAP and Jetpack is that rather than just give access you need to go through the process of generating API keys. This to me is closer to Searls’ call to understand our digital reality. Although this might seem daunting for some, the plugin provides thorough documentation to support users.
What I like about SNAP is that you can set a default structure for auto-posts, combining a number of predefined ingredients, but you can also quickly customise these when needs be. So if you want to share with a specific user or hashtag on Twitter, but not on Diigo, then you can adjust the Twitter description.
The last thing to consider with using my own site is developing a clear process for saving bookmarks. My first step was to create a bookmarklet using Chris Aldrich’s Post Kinds template. Also, I setup a process for sharing via Mobile using URL Forwarder app. This was a part of the puzzle missing with Radio3.
What Next?
I like the idea of collecting my bookmarks on my site. However, it has forced me to reflect on a number of things. One is the ability to properly syndicate to Diigo and Twitter. With Radio3, the publicised links connect to the corresponding site, whereas when I bookmark using my site, it shares the link to my post rather than the original site. This has me rethinking why I bookmark and POSSE. Maybe I do not need to share links to the original source, especially when my bookmarks have secondary information.
Another interesting feature to using my blog has been the ability to link to other sources within my descriptions. This is something that I do with my newsletter. On the other hand, I wonder if every link needs this level of detail. An answer to this maybe to utilise some other response post kinds, such as Likes and/or Favourite to support my blog as a resource.
This also leads me to wonder about the place of my Wikity blog. I really like the concept of constructing knowledge and ideas over time, however, I do not connect with other Wikity sites, one of the features Mike Caulfield built into the theme. I therefore wonder if these posts could be added as Notes or Articles, as I like having a title and in some themes the title of notes is chopped off.
Maybe rather than using Likes or combining my Wikity posts I maintain these other spaces, such as Radio3 and use them for specific purposes. Or maybe I need to dive into Known again, even if it seems that people are leaving? I think for now I might continue bookmarking with my site and see where it all goes.
So what about you? What process do you use to bookmark links for later? Has it changed over time? As always, comments welcome, especially if you have any tips or tricks that might help me on my way.
Also posted on IndieNews
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This is a collection of code that I often turn to when working with WordPress
Every time that I feel comfortable with my level of knowledge associated with WordPress, there is a problem that leads me to discover a particular attribute that I don’t know how I lived without. This time it is the code seemingly obfuscated beyond the WYSIWIG editor and the dashboard.
For some this code is about command line, while others it is about the bashing out the building blocks. My interest here is the everyday code, the little snippets that find there way in here or there while I work with WordPress, many of which have come from wandering through Chris Aldrich’s commonplace blog:
Webmentions
Webmentions are the building block for conversations across the web. However, with WordPress, they often get caught in moderation and/or flagged as spam by Akismet and other spam filter plugins. To prevent this, you can add this PHP snippet to your theme’s functions.php file:
function unspam_webmentions($approved, $commentdata) { return $commentdata['comment_type'] == 'webmention' ? 1 : $approved; } add_filter('pre_comment_approved', 'unspam_webmentions', '99', 2);
Alan Levine has documented the process of creating a child theme, which is useful when customising the code, while Gregor Morrill has developed code to approve webmentions from domains previously approved.
Microformats
Microformats is a data format built upon adopted standards and prior developments. There are a number of specifications, which can be manually added within the existing HTML. It provides the foundation for software to automatically process information. People like David Shanske and Matthias Pfefferle have developed plugins and themes to mark-up content in the backend. You can also use this site to check the microformats on your site, while for a more extensive introduction, listen to Tantek Çelik on the future of web apps.
Two microformats I have worked with are comments and rel=me.
Comment
Although the appropriate microformats are usually built into the Webmentions plugin. The plugin for theaded comments can be a bit more tempremental. Chris Aldrich recommends manually adding the reply class and URL just to make sure:
<a class="u-in-reply-to" href="http://www.example.com"></a>
I have come to do this out of habit for replies now.
Rel-me
Another microformat incorperated into many Indieweb sites is Rel-me. It is used to consolidate identity, as well as domain sign in.
<ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/aaronpk" rel="me">@aaronpk on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/aaronpk" rel="me">Github</a></li> <li><a href="https://google.com/+aaronpk" rel="me">Google</a></li> <li><a href="mailto:me@example.com" rel="me">me@example.com</a></li></ul>
Chris Aldrich has taken rel-me to its extremes by creating a page in which he records all his accounts. I have also started my own. For more on rel-me, watch Ryan Barrett’s keynote at IndieWeb Summit 2017.
Page Bookmarks
I remember coming across in plugin in Edublogs that allowed you to add a table of contents. This reminded me of the functionality in Google Docs and one of the things I noticed in both was the presence of a hashtag at the end of the URL. (Interestingly, now every heading in Google Docs has a unique identifier automatically created.) In Docs, this is something that can be added using the Bookmark feature, I wondered if the same could be done in WordPress. I discovered that within the tags, you insert ‘name=”unique-name”‘:
<a name="unique-name">Target Text</a>
This can then be used to guide readers to a specific point in your text.
Custom URLs for Post Kinds
Using the Post Kinds plugin provides a list a unique urls associated with the kinds of posts on the site. Chris Aldrich provides some guides in how to use these to create custom urls to generate a specific post screen. This can then be used to create a bookmarklet:
http://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=bookmark&kindurl=@url
Dariusz Kuśnierek provides some other examples of custom URLs, which help in U deratamding the way urls work in general.
RSS Feeds
RSS provides a means of following a site without checking in all of the time. To access a feed to follow in WordPress, you simply add ‘/feed/’ to the end:
http://www.example.com/feed
As some feeds can contain a range of content, it is possible to hone down to particular categories by adding ‘?cat=[category id]’ to the end.
http://www.example.com/feed?cat=[category id]
This can be useful if you only want to follow a specific subject or area.
Taking this a step further, you can also produce an RSS based on Post Kinds. Although not all blogs use these, for those that do it can be a useful demarcation. Similar to categories, you add ‘?kind=type’ to the end of the feed.
http://www.example.com/feed/?kind=bookmark
For more on RSS feeds, see this post from Chris Aldrich.
OPML
Where as RSS is used for a single feed, OPML allows a user to aggregate. I have written about them before. It is possible to store an OPML in WordPress. To access this you add the append ‘/wp-links-opml.php’ to the end.
http://www.example.com/wp-links-opml.php
In addition to this, Chris Aldrich has documented how to split a file into categories:
?link_cat=[category id]
I have yet to categorise my links, however Aldrich provides an extensive example.
So what about you? What little bits of code do you use? As always, comments welcome.
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Chris Jones on Twitter (Twitter)
@sourcePOV I like @jgmac1106‘s general idea, but having less overhead to manage and administer appealed to me a lot. Here’s some thoughts on what I ended up doing: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/
tl;dr: Having fewer sites to deal with seemed like a stronger idea. I still wanted to feature the richer content over the smaller tidbits while also not overwhelming people who had subscribed in the past. I also took into account trying to make it relatively easy for people to subscribe to the particular data they want/need out of my website. My home page has a list of various post kinds available which may be useful to think about as well.
@mrkrndvs has played around in this area of aggregation as well with a few different websites and may have some insight too.
Whatever you decide, be sure to have some fun along the way.
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Chris Jones on Twitter (Twitter)
@sourcePOV I like @jgmac1106‘s general idea, but having less overhead to manage and administer appealed to me a lot. Here’s some thoughts on what I ended up doing: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/
tl;dr: Having fewer sites to deal with seemed like a stronger idea. I still wanted to feature the richer content over the smaller tidbits while also not overwhelming people who had subscribed in the past. I also took into account trying to make it relatively easy for people to subscribe to the particular data they want/need out of my website. My home page has a list of various post kinds available which may be useful to think about as well.
@mrkrndvs has played around in this area of aggregation as well with a few different websites and may have some insight too.
Whatever you decide, be sure to have some fun along the way.
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I really like this idea and will try to copy when I have time. @wiobyrne this could be your newsletter hack as well
It feels like there has been a bit of resurgence when it comes to RSS lately. I wrote about it last year, Alan Levine has been doing alchemy, Aral Balkan has been reclaiming it, Tom Woodward has been doing jujitsu and Chris Aldrich has created his own feeds.
My takeaways have been:
Store your feed somewhere else. I store mine in WordPress and also sign up to some of Chris Aldrich’s feeds.
Use a reader that allows users to subscribe to an external OPML (I use Inoreader)
Create custom feeds based on tags and categories (or Post Kinds)
Another post that might be worth diving into is Chris Aldrich’s Feed Reader Revolution.
Replied to Why Not Blog? by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
I really like where you’re coming from on so many fronts here (and on your site in general). Thanks for such a great post on a Friday afternoon. A lot of what you’re saying echos the ideas of many old school bloggers who use their blogs as “thought spaces“. They write, take comments, iterate, hone, and eventually come up with stronger thoughts and theses. Because of the place in which they’re writing, the ideas slowly percolate and grow over a continuum of time rather than spring full-formed seemingly from the head of Zeus the way many books would typically appear to the untrained eye. I’ve not quite seen a finely coalesced version of this idea though I’ve seen many dance around it obliquely. The most common name I’ve seen is that of a “thought space” or sometimes the phrase “thinking out loud”, which I notice you’ve done at least once. In some sense, due to its public nature, it seems like an ever-evolving conversation in a public commons. Your broader idea and blogging experience really make a natural progression for using a website to slowly brew a book.
My favorite incarnation of the idea is that blogs or personal websites are a digital and public shared commonplace book. Commonplaces go back to the 15th century and even certainly earlier, but I like to think of websites as very tech-forward versions of the commonplaces kept by our forebears.
I’ve seen a few educators like Aaron Davis and Ian O’Byrne take to the concept of a commonplace, though both have primary websites for writing and broader synthesis and secondary sites for collecting and annotating the web. I tend to aggregate everything (though not always published publicly) on my primary site after having spent some time trying not to inundate email subscribers as you’ve done.
There’s also a growing movement, primarily in higher education, known as A Domain of One’s Own or in shortened versions as either “Domains” or even #DoOO which is a digital take on the Virgina Woolf quote “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.”
There are a growing number of educators, researchers, and technologists reshaping how the web is used which makes keeping an online commonplace much easier. In particular, we’re all chasing a lot of what you’re after as well:
To me, this sounds like one of the major pillars of the IndieWeb movement which is taking control of the web back from corporate social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et. al. Through odd serendipity, I came across your micro.blog account this morning which led me to your website. A lot of the underpinnings of micro.blog are informed by the IndieWeb movement. In many subtle ways, I might suspect the two had a lot of influence on your particular choice of WordPress theme.
Tonight I’ve also seen your reply to Dan Cohen’s question:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I had previously replied to Dan’s original question, but somehow missed your side thread at the time. I suspect you didn’t see our branch of the conversation either.
Interestingly, your presumption that the replies/notifications stay within their own domains isn’t necessarily fait accompli, at least not any more. There’s a new web specification in the past few years called Webmention that allows notifications and replies to cross website boundaries unlike Twitter @mentions which are permanently stuck within Twitter. Interestingly, because of the way you’ve set up your WordPress website to dovetail with micro.blog you’re almost 90 percent of the way to supporting it easily. If you add and slightly configure the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins, the asides and other content you’re syndicating into micro.blog will automatically collect the related conversation around them back to your own posts thus allowing you to have a copy of your content on your own website as well as the surrounding conversation, which is no longer as diffuse as you imagined it needed to be. Here’s an example from earlier this evening where I posted to my site and your response (and another) on micro.blog came back to me. (Sadly there’s a Gravatar glitch preventing the avatars from displaying properly, but hopefully I’ll solve that shortly.)
This same sort of thing can be done with Twitter including native threading and @mentions, if done properly, by leveraging the free Brid.gy service to force Twitter to send your site webmentions on your behalf. (Of course this means you might need to syndicate your content to Twitter in a slightly different manner than having micro.blog do on your behalf, but there are multiple ways of doing this.)
I also notice that you’ve taken to posting copies of your tweeted versions at the top of your comments sections. There’s a related IndieWeb plugin called Syndication Links that is made specifically to keep a running list of the places to which you’ve syndicated your content. This plugin may solve a specific need for you in addition to the fact that it dovetails well with Brid.gy to make sure your posts get the appropriate comments back via webmention.
I’m happy to help walk you through setting up some of the additional IndieWeb tech for your WordPress website if you’re interested. I suspect that having the ability to use your website as a true online hub in addition to doing cross website conversations is what you’ve been dreaming about, possibly without knowing it. Pretty soon you’ll be aggregating and owning all of your digital breadcrumbs to compile at a later date into posts and eventually articles, monographs, and books.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s a growing group of us in the education/research fields that are continually experimenting and building new functionalities for online (and specifically academic) communication. I and a plethora of others would welcome you to join us on the wiki, in chat, or even at upcoming online or in-person events.
In any case, thanks for sharing your work and your thoughts with the world. I wish more academics were doing what you are doing online–we’d all be so much richer for it. I know this has been long and is a potential rabbithole you may disappear into, so thank you for the generosity of your attention.
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I started implementing separate RSS feeds for different types of content a while back but just set them up to appear in the content search in readers like Feedly. They look great. Thanks for the walkthrough, Chris!
I’ve been doing a bit of clean up in my feed reader(s)–cleaning out dead feeds, fixing broken ones, etc. I thought I’d take a quick peek at some of the feeds I’m pushing out as well. I remember doing some serious updates on the feeds my site advertises three years ago this week, but it’s been a while since I’ve revisited it. While every post kind/type, category, and tag on my site has a feed (often found by simply adding
/feed/to the end of those URLs), I’ve made a few custom feeds for aggregated content.However, knowing that some feeds are broadly available from my site isn’t always either obvious or the same as being able to use them easily–one might think of it as a(n) (technical) accessibility problem. I thought I’d make a few tweaks to smooth out that user interface and hopefully provide a better user experience–especially since I’m publishing everything from my website first rather than in 30 different places online (which is a whole other UI problem for those wishing to follow me and my content). Since most pages on my site have a “Follow Me” button (courtesy of SubToMe), I just needed to have a list of generally useful feeds to provide it. While SubToMe has some instructions for suggesting lists of feeds, I’ve never gotten it to work the way I expected (or feed readers didn’t respect it, I’m not sure which?) But since most feed readers have feed discovery built in as a feature, I thought I’d leverage that aspect. Thus I threw into the
<head>of my website a dozen or so links from some of the most typical feeds people may be most interested in from my site. Now you can click on the follow button, choose your favorite feed reader, and then your reader should provide you with a large list of feeds which you might want to subscribe. These now broadly include the full feed, a comments feed, feeds for all the individual kinds (bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, listens, etc.) but potentially more useful: a “microblog feed” of all my status-related updates and a “linkblog feed” for all my link-related updates (generally favorites, likes, reads, and bookmarks).Some of these sub-feeds may be useful in some feed readers which don’t yet have the ability for you to choose within the reader what you’d like to see. I suspect that in the future social readers will allow you to subscribe to my primary firehose or comments feeds, which are putting out about 85 and 125 posts a week right now, and you’ll be able to subscribe to those, but then within their interface be able to choose individual types by means of filters to more quickly see what I’ve been bookmarking, reading, listening to or watching. Then if you want to curl up with some longer reads, filter by articles; or if you just want some quick hits, filter by notes. And of course naturally you’ll be able to do this sort of filtering across your network too. I also suspect some of them will build in velocity filters and friend-proximity filters so that you’ll be able to see material from people who don’t post as often highlighted or to see people’s content based on your personal rankings or categories (math friends, knitting circle, family, reading group, IndieWeb community, book club, etc.). I’ve recently been enjoying Kicks Condor’s FraidyCat reader which touches on some of this work though it’s not what most people would consider a full-featured feed reader but might think of as a filter/reader dashboard sort of product.
Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll write a bit of code so that each individual page on my site that you visit will provide feeds in the header for all the particular categories, tags, and post kinds that appear on that page?That might make a clever, and simple little plugin, though honestly that’s the sort of code I would expect CMSes like WordPress to provide out of the box. Of course, perhaps broader adoption of microformats and clever readers will obviate the need for all these bits?
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This is awesome Cherie! I love having the ability to pick and choose exactly what content I get from people’s websites like this. Few know that it’s even a possibility.
I did some explorations a while back because a few people complained when I went from posting to my site a few times a month to posting sometimes 20-60 times a day for every tiny little thing.
Aside: I just looked and my site is putting out almost 10,000 posts a year, so maybe I need something more severe sounding than firehose? :O
You may have run across it in some of your research, but I’ve written a few tidbits that might help you refine some bits as you tinker. I’ll look forward to seeing what else your site does that mine can copy as well.
One thing I’ve been wanting to do as well is to provide some SubToMe buttons to help make it easier for people to subscribe to feeds from my site on my subscribe page. Perhaps that’s better than the page of crazy code people get when they click on RSS feed pages, especially if they don’t know what to do with those links?
One day I’d love to create a dashboard of all the feeds my site offers as checkboxes or something to let people create their own custom feeds using and/or/not operators using WordPress’ built in feed URLs, but it seems like an awfully big project.
Since you’re on micro.blog as well, I’ll mention that the concatenation of feeds using the Post Kinds plugins also allows me more direct control of what I pipe into micro.blog. I’m currently using the following feed in my account settings to post to m.b.:
https://boffosocko.com/kind/article,note,photo,read,watch,listen,bookmark,favorite/feed/For your reply tests, feel free to use this post as a test ground if you like. For sites that support Webmention, you should be able to reply to my post directly from the webmention/comment in the comments section of your original post. But you could also try to create a completely new post that is a reply to this one as well. Both should work.
If you use Twitter along with Brid.gy I’ve also found an interesting “secret” there for creating nested threading:
https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/