Following

93 thoughts on “Following”

1. Somewhere between the granularity of following my daily updates and my about page here’s a quick outline of things I’ve been doing within the past…

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2. Modernist BreadCrumbs (Heritage Radio Network)

   Modernist Cuisine founder Nathan Myhrvold and head chef Francisco Migoya join Michael Harlan Turkell on Modernist BreadCrumbs, a special series taking a new look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet: bread. Each episode explores bread from a different angle; from its surprising and often complicated past, to the grains, tools, and microbes we use to make it, and the science behind every loaf. The show looks at the discoveries and techniques from Modernist Bread, as well as interviews with the scientists and bakers who are shaping the future of bread.

   Subscribing to/following this. Looks interesting. Jeremy Cherfas may appreciate both it and the entire network itself if he hasn’t heard of them before.
   Can’t wait to start listening to episodes.
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   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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3. Within the social media space there’s a huge number of services that provide a variety of what I would call bookmark-type functionality of one sort or another. They go under a variety of monikers including bookmarks, likes, favorites, stars, reads, follows, claps, and surely many quirky others. Each platform has created its own semantics which don’t always overlap with the others.
   Because I’m attempting to own all of my own data, I’ve roughly mapped many of these intents into my own website. But because I have the ultimate control over them, I get to form my own personal definitions. I also have a lot more control over them in addition to adding other metadata to each for better after-the-fact search and use within my personal online commonplace book. As such, I thought it might be useful to lay out some definitions (both for myself and others) for how I view these on my website.
   At the basest level, I look at most of these interactions simply as URL permalinks to interesting content and their aggregation as a “linkblog”, or a feed of interesting links I’ve come across. The specific names given to them imply a level of specificity about what I think exactly makes them interesting.
   In addition to a bookmark specific feed, which by itself could be considered a “traditional” linkblog, my site also has separate aggregated feeds for things I’ve liked, read, followed, and favorited. It’s the semantic reasons for saving or featuring these pieces of content which ultimately determine which names they ultimately have. (For those interested in subscribing to one or or more, or all of these, one can add /feed/ to the ends of the specific types’ URLs, which I’ve linked,  for an RSS feed. Thus, for example, http://boffosocko.com/type/link/feed/ will give you the RSS feed for the “Master” linkblog that includes all the bookmarks, likes, reads, follows, and favorites.)
   On my site, I try to provide a title for the content and some type of synopsis of what the content is about. These help to provide some context to others seeing them as well as a small reminder to me of what they were about. When appropriate/feasible, I’ll try to include an image for similar reasons. I’ll also often add a line of text or two as a commentary or supplement to my thoughts on the piece. Finally, I add an icon to help to quickly visually indicate which of the types of posts each is, so they can be more readily distinguished when seen in aggregate.
   In relative order of decreasing importance or value to me I would put them in roughly the following order of importance (with their attached meanings as I view them on my site):

   Favorite – This is often something which might easily have had designations of bookmark, like, and/or read, or even multiple of them at the same time. In any case they’re often things which I personally find important or valuable in the long term. There are far less of these than any of the other types of linkblog-like posts.

   Follow – Indicating that I’m now following a person, organization, or source of future content which I deem to have enough regular constant value to my life that I want to be able to see what that source is putting out on a regular basis. Most often these sources have RSS feeds which I consume in a feed reader, but frequently they’ll appear on other social silos which I will have ported into a feed reader as well. Of late I try to be much more selective in what I’m following and why. I also categorize sources based on topics of value to me. Follows often include sources which I have either previously often liked or bookmarked or suspect I would like or bookmark frequently in the future. For more details see: A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) and the actual Following page.

   Read – These are linkblog-like posts which I found interesting enough for one reason or another to have actually spent the time to read in their entirety. For things I wish to highlight or found most interesting, I’ll often add additional thought or commentary in conjunction with the post.

   Like – Depending on the content, these posts may not always have been read in their entirety, but I found them more interesting than the majority of content which I’ve come across. Most often these posts serve to show my appreciation for the original source of the related post as a means of saying “congratulations”, “kudos”, “good job”, or in cases of more personal level content “I appreciate this”, “you’re awesome”, or simply as the tag says “I liked this.”

   Bookmark – Content which I find interesting, but might not necessarily have the time to deal with at present. Often I’ll wish to circle back to the content at some future point and engage with at a deeper level. Bookmarking it prevents me from losing track of it altogether. I may optionally add a note about how the content came to my attention to be able to better remember it at a future time. While there are often things here which others might have “liked” or “favorited” on other social silos, on my site these things have been found interesting enough to have been bookmarked, but I haven’t personally read into them enough yet to form any specific opinion about them beyond their general interest to me or potentially followers interested in various category tags I use. I feel like this is the lowest level of interaction, and one in which I see others often like, favorite, or even repost on other social networks without having actually read anything other than the headline, if they’ve even bothered to do that. In my case, however, I more often than not actually come back to the content while others on social media rarely, if ever, do.

   While occasionally some individual specimens of each might “outrank” others in the category above this is roughly the order of how I perceive them. Within this hierarchy, I do have some reservations about including the “follow” category, which in some sense I feel stands apart from the continuum represented by the others. Still it fits into the broader category of a thing with a URL, title, and high interest to me. Perhaps the difference is that it represents a store of future potentially useful information that hasn’t been created or consumed yet? An unseen anti-library of people instead of books in some sense of the word.
   I might also include the Reply post type toward the top of the list, but for some time I’ve been categorizing these as “statuses” or “note-like” content rather than as “links”. These obviously have a high priority if lumped in as I’ve not only read and appreciated the underlying content, but I’ve spent the time and thought to provide a reasoned reply, particularly in cases where the reply has taken some time to compose. I suppose I might more likely include these as linkblog content if I didn’t prefer readers to value them more highly than if they showed up in those feeds. In some sense, I value the replies closer on par to my longer articles for the value of not only my response, but for that of the original posts themselves.
   In general, if I take the time to add additional commentary, notes, highlights, or other marginalia, then the content obviously resonated with me much more than those which stand as simple links with titles and descriptions.
   Perhaps in the near future, I’ll write about how I view these types on individual social media platforms. Often I don’t post likes/favorites from social platforms to my site as they often have less meaning to me directly and likely even less meaning to my audiences here. I suppose I could aggregate them here on my site privately, but I have many similar questions and issues that Peter Molnar brings up in his article Content, Bloat, privacy, arichives.
   I’m curious to hear how others apply meaning to their linkblog type content especially since there’s such a broad range of meaning from so many social sites. Is there a better way to do it all? Is it subtly different on sites which don’t consider themselves (or act as) commonplace books?
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4. clevercast by Jonathan LaCour (cleverca.st)

   Hello, there! My name is Jonathan LaCour, and this is “clevercast,” my microcast. A microcast is a short form podcast that is published on a regular basis. Topics for this microcast range broadly, but its mostly about my life as a technologist, and will include:

   My love of the IndieWeb

   My open source work

   To learn more about me, you should visit my website, where I post photos, articles, microblog posts, recipes, and more.

   I’ve been following the inimitable Jonathan LaCour for quite a while, but I’ve just discovered the link to his new microcast which I’m immediately adding to the growing list of interesting microcasts I’m following.

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5. Followed Doug Belshaw (Open Educational Thinkering)

   I’m Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkerer. I help people become more productive in their use of technology.

   Recently, I’ve joined Moodle to lead an innovation project currently entitled Project MoodleNet. From January 2018 this takes up four days, or 30 hours, of my working week.

   I’m also a consultant through Dynamic Skillset, where I help people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology, and I co-founded a co-operative known as We Are Open which exists to spread the culture, processes, and benefits of working openly.

   In previous guises I’ve worked for Mozilla and Jisc, and before that was a teacher and senior leader in schools.

   I write here mainly about education, technology and productivity. Other places I write include discours.es (commentary), literaci.es (new literacies-related), and ambiguiti.es (more philosophical).

   I’m following him via his own website, since he’s “off Twitter” and primarily publishing in his own space:

   Just a quick note to say that my tweets during #OER18 don’t mean I’m “back on Twitter” (although thanks for the DMs!)
   Also, as usual, I’ll be deleting my tweets next week so if there’s any photos I’ve taken during the conference you like, download them! (CC0)
   — Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) April 19, 2018

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   For others I’m following in Open Education: http://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Open+Education
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6. Followed Doug Belshaw (Open Educational Thinkering)

   I’m Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkerer. I help people become more productive in their use of technology.

   Recently, I’ve joined Moodle to lead an innovation project currently entitled Project MoodleNet. From January 2018 this takes up four days, or 30 hours, of my working week.

   I’m also a consultant through Dynamic Skillset, where I help people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology, and I co-founded a co-operative known as We Are Open which exists to spread the culture, processes, and benefits of working openly.

   In previous guises I’ve worked for Mozilla and Jisc, and before that was a teacher and senior leader in schools.

   I write here mainly about education, technology and productivity. Other places I write include discours.es (commentary), literaci.es (new literacies-related), and ambiguiti.es (more philosophical).

   I’m following him via his own website, since he’s “off Twitter” and primarily publishing in his own space:

   Just a quick note to say that my tweets during #OER18 don’t mean I’m “back on Twitter” (although thanks for the DMs!)
   Also, as usual, I’ll be deleting my tweets next week so if there’s any photos I’ve taken during the conference you like, download them! (CC0)
   — Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) April 19, 2018

   https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
   For others I’m following in Open Education: http://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Open+Education

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7. Cleaning out dead RSS feeds from my following page.

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8. Pingback: Chris Aldrich

9. How do you define #IndieWeb ?

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   1. It says here indieweb.org that “The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web””, but that’s just a start and of course there is more to it than that. More a state of mind than a thing, I’d say.

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   2. I look at the three statements on indieweb.org in the hero CTA as the values of #indieweb that are reached by trying to live the principles in our online spaces: indieweb.org/principles though been brainstorming about translating principles for rest of us

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   3. A stunning and simple question. Here’s my answer for what the #IndieWeb is. I challenge you to create your own.
      boffosocko.com/2018/06/15/def…

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10. Read Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls by David Shanske (David Shanske)

    Vouch is an extension to the webmention protocol. Webmentions usually have two parameters…source and target. Target is the URL on your website  that the Source URL is linking to.
    The vouch parameter is a third URL to help the target determine whether or not they should accept the webmention. This…

    I like the sound of where this is going already! All these small little pieces loosely joined to build a much larger edifice is certainly interesting.
    I’ve got a somewhat reasonable bookmarklet for quickly following people, though it’s not marked up with XFN data (yet) — perhaps another data field for Post Kinds? I do wish that there was either a mechanism for adding those to my Following page via the WordPress Link Manager or someone had a means of parsing lots of follow posts so I could quickly have data for both Vouch as well as for microsub readers either via my follow feed list or via OPML export and/or OPML subscription. WordPress obviously has some of the infrastructure built already, but there’s certainly a more IndieWeb way of doing it that wouldn’t require side-files like OPML.
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11. Yes, discovery can be an issue, but if one is providing various feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON, or h-feed) of various post types, then it becomes easier to slice and dice the content coming out of particular websites. I’ve got my website set up so that nearly every post format, post kind, category, and tag has its own feed. Ideally, you should be able to extract almost anything you’d want from my site via a custom feed if necessary.
    As an example if you want to follow what I’m reading, there’s a feed for that. Or you can listen to the things I’m listening to by subscribing to my fauxcast.
    Separately, I maintain a following page which, similar to a blogroll, is a list of sites I’m following along with OPML of the full list or subcategories. Thus if you want to subscribe to the IndieWeb OPML list, it’s there for you. (Even more fun if you’re using functionality like OPML subscriptions as they’re done in Inoreader, so that when I update my list, yours automatically does too.)
    If you’re interested in recreating portions of some of this I’ve tried to document a lot of it (for WordPress at least) at https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.

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12. Yes, discovery can be an issue, but if one is providing various feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON, or h-feed) of various post types, then it becomes easier to slice and dice the content coming out of particular websites. I’ve got my website set up so that nearly every post format, post kind, category, and tag has its own feed. Ideally, you should be able to extract almost anything you’d want from my site via a custom feed if necessary.
    As an example if you want to follow what I’m reading, there’s a feed for that. Or you can listen to the things I’m listening to by subscribing to my fauxcast.
    Separately, I maintain a following page which, similar to a blogroll, is a list of sites I’m following along with OPML of the full list or subcategories. Thus if you want to subscribe to the IndieWeb OPML list, it’s there for you. (Even more fun if you’re using functionality like OPML subscriptions as they’re done in Inoreader, so that when I update my list, yours automatically does too.)
    If you’re interested in recreating portions of some of this I’ve tried to document a lot of it (for WordPress at least) at https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.

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13. Replied to No Good WordPress Blogroll Plugins by Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)

    Feh. Apparently there are no good blogroll plugins for WordPress.   I did look extensively through the WP plugins directory but didn’t find anything interesting. Most plugins were way out of date for my version of WP.

    Might be an opportunity there for the Indieweb movement to aid discovery.

    Apologies Brad. I just saw your follow up post and had meant to reply to your earlier one when I saw it last week, I just didn’t have the time to write a quick response. I had hoped you might have found something even better than what I’ve put together previously or perhaps started building a newer and shinier edifice.
    There is actually an excellent and solid “plugin” for creating a blogroll, but it’s actually been hiding in WordPress core for ages: the original Link Manager. Use of it declined so much it was programatically “removed”, but all the code is still in core, it still works wonderfully, and it only requires a single line of code (or the simplest plugin ever written) to re-enable it.
    It was very solid and didn’t need much iteration, so it should work fine with current versions of WordPress–it certainly does on mine.
    I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
    Even if you just want a plug and play plugin, there are details for that in the post as well, you’ll just be stuck with putting the blogroll into a traditional sidebar position. (With conditional statements in the sidebar widget, you  could restrict the blogroll widget to only displaying on a “Following” page, for example.)
    I do think there is still a more IndieWeb way of doing this, potentially by making follow posts with mark up that could be parsed by microsub readers perhaps? Certainly dovetailing something with microsub seems to be a laudable goal. I would like to eventually dive into the Link Manager code and add some additional microformats as well as update the OPML to v2, but there’s enough back compatibility that the older version is fine for most use cases I’ve run across. I know David Shanske has some ideas about some changes he’d like to see in the future as well. You could always also go super low tech the way Greg did and have a blogroll post that you update over time, though perhaps a page is a better way to go? Updating things to be more automated is certainly a reasonable goal though.
    Give it a spin and see what you think. Here’s my Following page (aka blogroll) with details at the very bottom for subcategories of OPML subscription. I’ll try to update the IndieWeb blogroll page with some of these details to make them more imminently findable as well.
    
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14. Replied to This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time by Alan Levine (@cogdog) (Extend Activity Bank)

    People will claim they can replace RSS Readers with social media streams like twitter. While we do get many key resources and news stories via social media, let’s dispute that claim:

    Clutter, noise, distraction. What you get is interspersed with many things that are outside your interests, rants, yelling, silly gifs. That’s a lot of filtering.

    You Miss It, You Lose it. Social media is focused at the head of the stream. While you sleep or actually do something productive away from social media, it all flows away. Yes, maybe your network can signal with repeating important things, but its spotty.

    Duplication You have no means to quickly know what you have already looked at, and you see may the same story multiple times.

    You Are Subject to Algorithms Especially on facebook, what you see is determined by the mysteries of an algorithm. Sure you choose sources by followers, but the means by which information is presented is determined by some outside automated entity.

    This activity brings you an exception to the technology as time-saving lie; it’s old tool that many people have abandoned. I will wade carefully through the acronym jargon jungle, but we are talking about using an RSS Feed Reader to monitor the most recent news, blog posts, data from sources you choose to follow, not ones dished out by some company’s algorithm.

    RSS is incredibly valuable as is OPML.
    I had used Feedly for several years, but made the switch to Inoreader last year, in part because it has one additional useful feature that Feedly doesn’t: OPML subscription. While it’s nice to be able to import and export OPML files, needing to remember to update them can be an unnecessary step, particularly if 20+ people need to do the update to capture all the new RSS feeds added. (As an example, say one or two students join a class late and everyone has already got the original OPML export and now needs to update to add a few more feeds to keep track of classroom activity.)  OPML subscription improves this by allowing the subscription to an OPML link with multiple feeds in it. If the original OPML file updates with new feeds, then the reader automatically updates them and pushes them out to everyone subscribed to that OPML file!
    Think of an OPML subscription as an updating subscription to a bundle of RSS feeds which all also provide their own individual updates. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of individual feeds, you can subscribe to whole bundles of feeds.
    For those looking for some sample OPML links to subscribe to, try some of mine which are listed at the bottom of the linked page. For some ideas about building your own data stores with OPML links for WordPress, try my Following Page solution. WordPress’s old Link Manager described on that page will provide the ability to store the data and provide the OPML links, the rest of the page discusses publishing it on one’s site so that it’s publicly available if you wish. URL schemes for sub-categories are discussed separately.

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15. Replied to a tweet by Sara Soueidan (Twitter)

    If you have a blog and write/share useful things (big or small) about Web design / front-end dev and you provide an RSS feed to the blog, please respond to this tweet w/ the URL for it — I’d like to add more useful content feeds to my reader.— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) July 20, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    I tinker on my own website and frequently write about IndieWeb related technologies because the web is my social media platform. The feed you might appreciate most is https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/.
    I have feeds for nearly every tag/category or post type on my site for convenience (just add /feed/ to almost anything). You could subscribe to my firehose feed, but I suspect even my mother would tire of it quickly.
    I’m curious if you have OPML files or similar bundles of feeds you follow that are shareable or subscribe-able?

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16. Pingback: Chris Aldrich

17. Replied to a post by Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)

    @kfitz Realized I can just use the list here to make my #IndieWebEdu feed: https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education Its okay about iOS..nobody is perfect.

    For fun and not to need to reinvent the wheel:

    Educators in (or aware of IndieWeb) with a subscribe-able OPML link (or you should be able to save the OPML as a file and import it into your reader)
    Related Educators in IndieWeb Twitter List

    My following page may have other feeds of interest as well.

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18. This Article was mentioned on brid-gy.appspot.com

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19. Was using @inoreader and rss bots in @slackhq but then ran into this problem of two entries for every post in @inoreader, broke my bots, resulted to just posting channels in Slack. @cogdog always builds the coolest WordPress streams but above my skills… jgregorymcverry.com/4925-2/

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20. Another useful tip–if you’ve not come across it–is to use @schnarfed‘s feed tools for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ to turn your social streams back into linear, non-algorithmic feeds. You can also get sub-feeds via Twitter Lists, [more…]
    boffosocko.com/2018/07/23/rep…

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21. I think the idea behind Blog Snoop is solid—I mean you’re just talking about
    trying to define the edges of a certain community. I’m sufficiently convinced now
    (between Reddit wikis and ‘awesome lists’) that directories still serve this purpose.
    Find The Others.
    
    I guess part of the problem is—what is the community? Bloggers? The Indieweb?
    The subset of the Indieweb that wants to talk about discovery? (Search, directories,
    blogrolls, etc.) I think you are shooting for larger than the Indieweb—bloggers,
    in general, right? That operate independently? So, do Medium blogs count?
    Ok, so, the usability of the directory is central. This makes sense: a directory
    is a practical instrument. It needs to be elegant and tight. Using a blog as a
    directory is very novel and very convenient—and it can work! But I think the
    directory itself needs to be incredibly sweet to use: full of great stuff, well-organized
    and fun to use, if possible. I think you have to really want to visit the directory
    regularly.
    Google won by distilling everything down to one box. It was actually fun to use
    Google because you could start typing and it would try to finish your sentence
    for you. Which I actually think more people enjoyed for its novelty than its
    usefulness. And it was useful, too!
    So a few starter suggestions:

    The whole tag cloud is off to the side, as if it’s not important.
    I can’t see some of the words in the tag cloud, they are too small.
    The biggest words in the tag cloud are words like “General” and “Internet”
    which are almost non-categories because they apply to all blogs.
    It’s not clear how to submit my own blog unless I dig. People should really
    be encouraged to participate.
    The text is large, so lots of scrolling is involved. I think this is what the
    ‘awesome lists’ are doing right. It’s also what Chris Aldrich is doing so well
    with his blogroll.
    A dense list, like the one Chris has, also feels more active, for some reason.
    The thing you are doing perfectly, though, is the care in the descriptions. This
    is actually the most important thing once the directory is usable—and you have
    that already.

    I am working on a personal directory right now, so my attention is there. But maybe
    if we keep talking about this, we can figure it out. Don’t give up—just keep
    talking and refining.
    You’ve actually given me a great idea (I think it might be ‘great’, who knows) for
    Indieweb.xyz. I think I’m going to make a directory of the sites that submit to it.
    And it will also show the sub (‘tag’) that they most commonly submit to. It would be a
    simple change and might help me gradually collect links to blogs that I can go
    through over time.
    Good luck, Brad! These tiny efforts may seem small in the face of massive social
    empires out there, but I think there are many people who are (or will) participate
    if they can just be found.

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22. I think the idea behind Blog Snoop is solid—I mean you’re just talking about
    trying to define the edges of a certain community. I’m sufficiently convinced now
    (between Reddit wikis and ‘awesome lists’) that directories still serve this purpose.
    Find The Others.
    
    I guess part of the problem is—what is the community? Bloggers? The Indieweb?
    The subset of the Indieweb that wants to talk about discovery? (Search, directories,
    blogrolls, etc.) I think you are shooting for larger than the Indieweb—bloggers,
    in general, right? That operate independently? So, do Medium blogs count?
    Ok, so, the usability of the directory is central. This makes sense: a directory
    is a practical instrument. It needs to be elegant and tight. Using a blog as a
    directory is very novel and very convenient—and it can work! But I think the
    directory itself needs to be incredibly sweet to use: full of great stuff, well-organized
    and fun to use, if possible. I think you have to really want to visit the directory
    regularly.
    Google won by distilling everything down to one box. It was actually fun to use
    Google because you could start typing and it would try to finish your sentence
    for you. Which I actually think more people enjoyed for its novelty than its
    usefulness. And it was useful, too!
    So a few starter suggestions:

    The whole tag cloud is off to the side, as if it’s not important.
    I can’t see some of the words in the tag cloud, they are too small.
    The biggest words in the tag cloud are words like “General” and “Internet”
    which are almost non-categories because they apply to all blogs.
    It’s not clear how to submit my own blog unless I dig. People should really
    be encouraged to participate.
    The text is large, so lots of scrolling is involved. I think this is what the
    ‘awesome lists’ are doing right. It’s also what Chris Aldrich is doing so well
    with his blogroll.
    A dense list, like the one Chris has, also feels more active, for some reason.
    The thing you are doing perfectly, though, is the care in the descriptions. This
    is actually the most important thing once the directory is usable—and you have
    that already.

    I am working on a personal directory right now, so my attention is there. But maybe
    if we keep talking about this, we can figure it out. Don’t give up—just keep
    talking and refining.
    You’ve actually given me a great idea (I think it might be ‘great’, who knows) for
    Indieweb.xyz. I think I’m going to make a directory of the sites that submit to it.
    And it will also show the sub (‘tag’) that they most commonly submit to. It would be a
    simple change and might help me gradually collect links to blogs that I can go
    through over time.
    Good luck, Brad! These tiny efforts may seem small in the face of massive social
    empires out there, but I think there are many people who are (or will) participate
    if they can just be found.

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    • info

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23. Replied to Memo: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop Blog Directory by Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)

    I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs.  The problem here is me: I’m running out of time.  I’m duplicating a lot …
    Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory
    We’ll see what happens.  It…

    Brad, much like Kicks Condor, I think you’re making a laudable effort, and one of the ways our work grows is to both keep up with it and experiment around.
    If I recall, programming wasn’t necessarily your strong suit, but like many in the IndieWeb will say: “Manual until it hurts!” By doing things manually, you’ll more easily figure out what might work and what might not, and then when you’ve found the thing that does, then you spend some time programming it to automate the whole thing to make it easier. It’s quite similar to designing a college campus: let the students walk around naturally for a bit then pave the natural walkways that they’ve created. This means you won’t have both the nicely grided and unused sidewalks in addition to the ugly grass-less beaten paths. It’s also the broader generalization of paving the cow paths.
    In addition to my Following page I’ve also been doing some experimenting with following posts using the Post Kinds Plugin. It is definitely a lot more manual than I’d like it to be. It does help to have made a bookmarklet to more quickly create follow posts, but until I’ve got it to a place that I really want it, it’s not (yet) worth automating taking the data from those follow posts to dump them into my Follow page for output there as well. Of course the fact that my follow posts have h-entry and h-feed mark up means that someone might also decide to build a parser that will extract my posts into a feed which could then be plugged into something else like a microsub-based reader so that I could make a follow post on my own site and the source is automatically added to my subscription list in my reader automatically.
    In addition to Kicks Condor, I’me seeing others start to kick the tires of these things as well. David Shanske recently wrote Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following, and Blogrolls, but I think he’s got a lot more going on in his thinking than he’s indicated in his post which barely scratches the surface.
    I also still often think back to a post from Dave Winer in 2016: Are you ready to share your OPML? This too has some experimental discovery features that only scratch the surface of the adjacent possible.
    And of course just yesterday, Kevin Marks (previously of Technorati) reminded us about rel=”directory” which could have some interesting implications for discovery and following. Think for a bit of how one might build a decentralized Technorati or something along the lines of Ryan Barrett’s indie map.
    As things continue to grow, I’m seeing some of all of our decisions and experiments begin to effect others as these are all functionality and discovery mechanisms that we’ll all need in the very near future. I hope you’ll continue to experiment and make cow paths that can eventually be paved.
    Featured Image: Cows on the path flickr photo by Reading Tom shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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24. Replied to #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress by Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)

    Hello in today’s first daily update I wanted to share about RSS if you wanted a little background here you go:

    My feeds for the class would be:

    for the tag edu522: https://boffosocko.com/tag/edu522/feed/

    for the dailyponderances: https://boffosocko.com/tag/dailyponderance/feed/

    I don’t have everyone in it yet, but I’ve started an OPML file for the class that one could use to subscribe to in Inoreader. Otherwise you can save the file (typically with the extension .xml) and upload it into the reader of your choice, however you’ll need to come back and get updates as I add new feeds. If you’d like me to add you to the list, drop your details into the comments as you’d like them to appear on my Following Page or send my original post a webmention from your site.
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25. Followed David Wiley (davidwiley.org)

    Dr. David Wiley is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources by schools, community and state colleges, and universities. He is also currently the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University’s graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he leads the Open Education Group (and was previously a tenured Associate Professor).

    As an academic, Dr. Wiley has received numerous recognitions for his work, including an National Science Foundation CAREER grant and appointments as a Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business, and a Shuttleworth Fellow. As a social entrepreneur, Dr. Wiley has founded or co-founded numerous entities including Lumen Learning, Degreed, and Mountain Heights Academy. In 2009, Fast Company named Dr. Wiley one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

    David was born and grew up in West Virginia. He is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). He served a two-year mission for the church in Fukuoka, Japan, and now serves as bishop of a student congregation at Brigham Young University. David lives in Utah with his wife and five children and enjoys hiking, running, playing basketball, listening to and making music, and reading.

    Primary blog at https://opencontent.org/blog/
    I suppose it should cease to amaze me that educators are so far ahead of the curve on owning so much of their identities and content online. Many seem to be OG IndieWeb. I like the way his primary page sets up his identity and he’s owning at least all of his bigger article output. And then there’s a lovely blogroll on his blog page, with so many names I recognize and several more I’m going to have to add to my own.
    As I look at his bio and see Degreed, it reminds me while shadowing Greg McVerry’s EDU 522 course, that I’ve been wanting to own more of my learning online. I’ll have to take a look again at how Degreed is set up from a UI perspective and see what I can glean from it, particularly as it takes data from multiple other platforms and pulls it into it’s own platform in a very PESOS sort of workflow. I wonder if Degreed might take personal websites as a source of content and then be able to add certifications? This might also fit in with using Webmention as infrastructure for doing badges and credentialing.

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26. I’ve been thinking more about local news lately, so I’ve taken some time to aggregate some of my local news sources. While I live in the Los Angeles area, it’s not like I’m eschewing the Los Angeles Times, but I wanted to go even more uber-local than this. Thus I’m looking more closely at my local Altadena and Pasadena news outlets. I’m a bit surprised to see just how many small outlets and options I’ve got! People say local news is dying or dead, so I thought I would only find two or three options–how wrong could I have been?
    In addition to some straightforward journalistic related news sources, I’ve also included some additional local flavor news which includes town councils, the chamber of commerce, historical societies, etc. which have websites that produce feeds with occasional news items.
    Going forward you can see these sources aggregated on my following page.
    For those who are interested I’ve created an OPML file which contains the RSS feeds of all these sources if they’d like to follow them as well. Naturally most have other social media presences, but there’s usually no guarantee that if you followed them that way that you’ll actually see the news you wanted.
    If anyone is aware of other sources, I’m happy to add them to the list.
    Here’s the initial list of sources:

     ColoradoBoulevard.net – Daily news and events magazine for Pasadena and Greater Pasadena area.

     Pasadena Now – Where else can you get this much daily news and information about Pasadena?

     The Outlook – Local news for Pasadena, La Canada/Flintridge, and San Marino areas

     Pasadena Independent – Relevant Pasadena news to engage the community

     Pasadena Weekly – Greater Pasadena’s Free News and Entertainment Weekly

     Pasadena Star News – Local news source for Pasadena and the surrounding area providing breaking news, sports, business, entertainment, things to do, opinion, photos, videos and more from the west San Gabriel Valley

     Pasadena Magazine – Pasadena is the bi-monthly magazine of Pasadena and its surrounding areas – the diverse, historically rich and culturally vibrant region.

     Altadena Chamber of Commerce – News and information from the Altadena, CA Chamber of Commerce

     The Pasadena / San Gabriel Valley Journal – Serving the Pasadena / San Gabriel Valley | A locally owned and operated independent African American newspaper

     Altadena Town Council – Proudly Serving Our Community

     Altadena Now – Local news for Altadena, CA

     Altadena Patch – Local news and events from Altadena, CA Patch.

     Altadena Heritage – Altadena Heritage Advocacy and Preservation

     Altadena Filming – A resource for filming in Altadena.

     Altadena Historical Society – AHS, a non-profit organization, was founded to gather, preserve, and make available information about the people, places and events that have shaped our community in the past.

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27. It’s constant work—finding each other through the noise.

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28. Replied to It’s time for a new branch of public media by Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

    President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Previously, an independent public broadcaster had been established through grants by the Ford Foundation, but Ford began to withdraw its support.
    Here’s what he said:
    “It…

    I’ve been thinking very similarly along these lines for six months or more, but with a particular slant at journalistic enterprises. I’ve specifically been considering what would happen if small local newspapers and other journalistic outlets were running IndieWeb-esque platforms for their local communities. This would potentially help to moderate and encourage local conversations and consumption of local grown content and journalism and potentially improve the toxicity of general social media or massive issues like those that Facebook is facing with genocidal effects of their platform in Myanmar where they didn’t have any local presence or moderation much less people in-house who had language capabilities to even begin to deal with these issues. This type of mission could better empower entities to improve both local journalism by binding it to a different substrate as a financial model  and fix many of the issues we see with social media simultaneously.
    This general idea also isn’t too dissimilar from Greg McVerry’s idea of having local libraries allow patrons to “check out” (aka set up) their own domains and social presences/identities using their library cards.
    The difficulty I see is that as the world moves toward increased specialization, that looking for newspapers or even municipalities to oversee and maintain such infrastructure may be difficult. I already see issues with smaller outlets building and maintaining their own publishing platforms with simple out-of-the-box CMS solutions that are relatively easy-to-use and modify with simple plugins. (In a recent inventory of my local news sources, I’ll note here that nearly 100% of the local online news sources for my community are running on WordPress, but not all of them have a huge amount of technical knowledge about what and how they’re doing it in those spaces). The growth of content management systems like Ghost, which has a journalistic bent, also indicates that there isn’t a “perfect solution” to the CMS problem, much less the issues of running IndieWeb-like platforms/clusters based on simpler platforms like WordPress or even Known. There’s certainly a lot of space out there for third party companies to help grow and expand in both of these areas (community-based social platforms as well as journalism platforms and admixtures thereof.)
    If local institutions or even governments did move in this direction, then their users are at the potential mercy of third-party businesses which may not necessarily be aligned with local values.  An example of something akin to this was covered recently in The Daily on their episode Taking Over Local News. I’m also reminded about of my poor experiences  with un-moderated third party platforms like Nextdoor.com can be.
    Another microcosm to look at is how hundreds of thousands of public libraries are interfacing with the four or more media suppliers of e-books and what that financial model looks like as, if taken, I would suspect a similar trajectory for local social public media. Similarly looking at how municipalities interface with cable franchising can reveal some pitfalls to avoid moving forward with respect to monopolies and competition.
    Certainly some additional thought about how to solve these issues at the smaller local and personal levels is welcome. Thanks for dipping into and expanding my surface area of thinking Ben.

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29. Replied to a tweet by Dries Buytaert (Twitter)

    “It touches me that some people have been reading my blog for over a decade.” https://dri.es/forty I’ve been thinking about that since. It would be nice to know who is subscribed to your blog so you can build a relationship. #indieweb @davewiner— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) November 22, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Happy birthday Dries! If I may, can I outline a potential web-based birthday present based on your  wish?
    Follow posts
    With relation to your desire to know who’s subscribed and potentially reading your posts, I think there are a number of ways forward, and even better, ways that are within easy immediate reach using Drupal as well as many other CMSes using some simple web standards.
    I suspect you’ve been following Kristof De Jaeger’s work with the Drupal IndieWeb module which is now a release candidate. It will allow you to send and receive Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) which are simple notifications much the way they work on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve written a bit about how they could be leveraged to accomplish several things in Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
    Not mentioned in that article for brevity is the ability to send notifications via Webmention when one makes follow or subscription posts.
    As an example, I’ve created a follow post for you for which my site would have sent a Webmention. Unfortunately at the time, your site didn’t support receiving it, so you would have missed out on it unless you support older legacy specs like pingback, trackback, or refback.
    I also created a larger related Following page of people and sites I’m subscribed to which also lists you, so you would have received another notification from it if you supported Webmention.
    I’m unaware of anyone actually displaying these notifications on their website (yet!), though I’ve got some infrastructure on my own site to create a “Followed by” page which will store and show these follows or subscriptions. At present, they’re simply stored in my back end.
    Read Posts

    Heh – that’s funny – @lizzjoy and I were just saying we need to find a way of knowing who is reading the Drupal community and association blogrolls…
    — Rachel Lawson 🇪🇺 (@rachel_norfolk) November 22, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    As for Rachel’s request, this too is also possible with “read” webmentions. I maintain a specific linkblog feed (RSS) with all of the online material I read. All of those posts send notifications to the linked sites. While it’s not widely supported by other platforms yet, there are a few which do, so that online publications can better delineate and display the difference between likes, bookmarks, reads, etc. There’s at least one online newspaper among 800+WordPress websites which support this functionality. I suspect that with swentel’s Drupal module and some code for supporting the proper microformats, this is a quick reality in the Drupal space as well. Because the functionality is built on basic web standards, it’s possible for any CMS to support them. All that’s left is to ramp up adoption.
    A quick note on Microsub and feed readers
    Dave Winer in his reply to you linked to a post about showing likes on his site (presumably using the Twitter API) where he laments:

    I know the Like icon doesn’t show up in your feed reader (maybe that can change)

    Interestingly, swentel’s module also supports Microsub, so that reader clients will allow one to like (bookmark, or reply to) posts directly within readers which will then send Micropub requests to one’s website to post them as well as to potentially send Webmention notifications. These pieces help to close the circle of posting, reading, and easily interacting on the open web the way closed silos like Facebook, Twitter, et al. allow.
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30. Replied to a tweet by Dries Buytaert (Twitter)

    “It touches me that some people have been reading my blog for over a decade.” https://dri.es/forty I’ve been thinking about that since. It would be nice to know who is subscribed to your blog so you can build a relationship. #indieweb @davewiner— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) November 22, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Happy birthday Dries! If I may, can I outline a potential web-based birthday present based on your  wish?
    Follow posts
    With relation to your desire to know who’s subscribed and potentially reading your posts, I think there are a number of ways forward, and even better, ways that are within easy immediate reach using Drupal as well as many other CMSes using some simple web standards.
    I suspect you’ve been following Kristof De Jaeger’s work with the Drupal IndieWeb module which is now a release candidate. It will allow you to send and receive Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) which are simple notifications much the way they work on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve written a bit about how they could be leveraged to accomplish several things in Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
    Not mentioned in that article for brevity is the ability to send notifications via Webmention when one makes follow or subscription posts.
    As an example, I’ve created a follow post for you for which my site would have sent a Webmention. Unfortunately at the time, your site didn’t support receiving it, so you would have missed out on it unless you support older legacy specs like pingback, trackback, or refback.
    I also created a larger related Following page of people and sites I’m subscribed to which also lists you, so you would have received another notification from it if you supported Webmention.
    I’m unaware of anyone actually displaying these notifications on their website (yet!), though I’ve got some infrastructure on my own site to create a “Followed by” page which will store and show these follows or subscriptions. At present, they’re simply stored in my back end.
    Read Posts

    Heh – that’s funny – @lizzjoy and I were just saying we need to find a way of knowing who is reading the Drupal community and association blogrolls…
    — Rachel Lawson 🇪🇺 (@rachel_norfolk) November 22, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    As for Rachel’s request, this too is also possible with “read” webmentions. I maintain a specific linkblog feed (RSS) with all of the online material I read. All of those posts send notifications to the linked sites. While it’s not widely supported by other platforms yet, there are a few which do, so that online publications can better delineate and display the difference between likes, bookmarks, reads, etc. There’s at least one online newspaper among 800+WordPress websites which support this functionality. I suspect that with swentel’s Drupal module and some code for supporting the proper microformats, this is a quick reality in the Drupal space as well. Because the functionality is built on basic web standards, it’s possible for any CMS to support them. All that’s left is to ramp up adoption.
    A quick note on Microsub and feed readers
    Dave Winer in his reply to you linked to a post about showing likes on his site (presumably using the Twitter API) where he laments:

    I know the Like icon doesn’t show up in your feed reader (maybe that can change)

    Interestingly, swentel’s module also supports Microsub, so that reader clients will allow one to like (bookmark, or reply to) posts directly within readers which will then send Micropub requests to one’s website to post them as well as to potentially send Webmention notifications. These pieces help to close the circle of posting, reading, and easily interacting on the open web the way closed silos like Facebook, Twitter, et al. allow.
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31. Replied to a tweet by Damian Yerrick (Twitter)

    I tried to recommend #IndieWeb technologies to those affected by a recent Tumblr policy change. But many I talked to claim that recommendation is the whole draw of silos, and IndieWeb’s lack of a recommendation engine is a deal breaker.
    “None currently.”https://t.co/k9c7ehsoZb

    — Damian Yerrick (@PinoBatch) December 4, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Because of the decentralized nature of the IndieWeb, it’s most likely that more centralized services in the vein of Indie Map or perhaps a Microsub client might build in this sort of recommendation engine functionality. But this doesn’t mean that all is lost! Until more sophisticated tools exist, bootstrapping on smaller individually published sorts of recommendations like follow posts or things like my Following Page (fka blogroll) with OPML support are more likely to be of interest and immediately fill the gap. Several feed readers like Feedly and Inoreader also have recommendation engines built in as well.
    Of course going the direction of old school blogs and following those who comment on your own site has historically been a quick way to build a network. I’m also reminded of Colin Walker’s directory which creates a blogroll of sorts by making a list of websites that have webmentioned his own. Webrings are also an interesting possibility for topic-related community building.
    Since Tumblr is unlikely to shut down immediately, those effected could easily add their personal websites to their bios to help transition their followerships to feed readers or other methods for following and reading.
    Of course the important thing in the near term is to spend a moment downloading and backing up one’s content just in case.
     
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32. I am scrolling through history (h/t to Kevin Marks for reminding of the ccurated posts by danah boyd) as we discuss how best to follow

    Source: Following People or Feeds in the #IndieWeb #mb #DoOO #edtechchat #literacies
    This reminds me: I still need to sort and tidy the feeds in my feed reader.  I’m using Chris Aldrich’s OPML feed file which is a firehose.

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33. Replied to Keeping track of my media diet by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

    This idea of tracking my media diet really appeals to me:

    Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts.
    Jason Kottke

    I follow a few people who do this too, sometimes pretty publicly. I’m not sure that I’d want to share everything I consume, but I do like the thought of capturing, and aggregating everything.
    I’m just not too sure how to pull it all together, if I were to do this.

    There are a few parts to having a media diet:
    1. keeping track of it all quickly and easily;
    2. going back to contemplate on it and deciding what may have been worthwhile or not; and
    3. using the above to improve upon your future media diet instead of consuming the same junk food in the future.
    I try to use my own website (cum digital commonplace book) to collect everything quickly using bookmarklets from the Post Kinds plugin or RSS feeds from popular media-related websites (GoodReads, Letterboxd, reading.am, etc.) in conjunction with IFTTT.com recipes to create private posts on my site’s back end. Naturally, not all of my posts are public since many are simply for my own reflection and edification. Usually logging the actions only takes a few seconds. Longer reviews and thoughts typically only take a few minutes if I choose to do so.
    The hardest part may be going through it all on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis to do some analysis and make the appropriate adjustments for the future. (Isn’t it always sticking with the adjustments that make it a “diet”?) Fortunately having all the data in one centralized place does make some of this work a lot easier.
    Having lists of what I read online has definitely helped me cut out all click-baity articles and listicles from my information diet. It’s also helped me cut down on using social media mindlessly when I think about the great things I could be reading or consuming instead. Bad national news has also spurred me to read more local news this year as well. Those interested in some of these ideas may appreciate Clay A. Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Comsumption, which I read several years back.
    I experimented with eating and drinking posts early last year too, and the nature of posting them publicly was somewhat useful in losing about 10 pounds, but the work in doing it all did seem a bit much since I didn’t have as easily an automated system for doing it as I might have liked. Now I do most of these posts privately. Definitely having the ability to look back at the ton of crap I’ve eaten in the past week or month does help with trying to be a bit healthier in my choices. I look at posting photos of my food/drink to my own site somewhat akin to dietitians who tell people to use a clean plate for every meal they have–the extra work, process, and clean up makes it more apparent what you’re doing to yourself.
    As I’ve written before about posting what I’m listening to, showing others that you’ve spent the time to actually listen to it and post about it on your own site (even with no commentary), is a great way to show that you’ve got “skin-in-the-game” when it comes to making recommendations. Kottke’s awesome recommendation about listening to the Seeing White Podcast has way more value if he could point to having spent the multiple hours listening to and contemplating it, the way I have. The situation is akin to that headline and link my friend just put on Twitter, but did she think the headline was cool or did she actually read the entire thing and wanted to recommend her followers also read it? Who can tell without some differentiation?
    Lastly, I keep a “following page” of people and feeds I’m following on a regular basis. Put into broad categories, it makes an easy method for periodically pruning out that portion of my media diet using OPML subscriptions in my feed reader.
    In the end, what you feed your body, as well as what you feed your brain, are important things to at least keep in the back of your mind.
     

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34. Read How to decentralize social media—a brief sketch by Larry Sanger (larrysanger.org)

    The problem about social media is that it is centralized. Centralization empowers massive corporations and governments to steal our privacy and restrict our speech and autonomy.

    Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

    The social media browser plugins. Here’s the killer feature. Create at least one (could be many competing) browser plugins that enable you to (a) select feeds and then (b) display them alongside a user’s Twitter, Facebook, etc., feeds. (This could be an adaptation of Greasemonkey.) In other words, once this feature were available, you could tell your friends: “I’m not on Twitter. But if you want to see my Tweet-like posts appear in your Twitter feed, then simply install this plugin and input my feed address. You’ll see my posts pop up just as if they were on Twitter. But they’re not! And we can do this because you can control how any website appears to you from your own browser. It’s totally legal and it’s actually a really good idea.” In this way, while you might never look at Twitter or Facebook, you can stay in contact with your friends who are still there—but on your own terms.  ❧

    This is an intriguing idea. In particular, it would be cool if I could input my OPML file of people I’m following and have a plugin like this work with other social readers.
    February 20, 2019 at 12:29PM

    We can look at a later iteration of Everipedia itself as an example. Right now, there is one centralized encyclopedia: Wikipedia. With the Everipedia Network, there will be a protocol that will enable people from all over the web to participate in a much broader project.  ❧

    As I look at this, I can’t help think about my desire to want to be able to link to a wiki in a post and have a Webmention added to that post’s “See Also” or reference section. With the link automatically added to the wiki’s page like this, future readers and editors could have access to my original and could potentially synopsize and include details from my post into the wiki’s article.
    February 20, 2019 at 12:41PM

    But how do we make it happen?  ❧

    Larry, I caught your Twitter conversation with Aaron Parecki earlier about IndieWeb. I’ve added a lot of the open specs he referenced to my own WordPress website with a handful of plugins and would be happy to help you do the same if you like. I think that with some of the IndieWeb tools, it’s always even more impressive if you can see them in action using something you’re already regularly using.
    If nothing else, it’ll give you some direct experience with how the decentralized nature of how these things work. I’m posting my reply to you own my own site and manually syndicating the reply (since you don’t yet support webmention, one of the protocols) which will give at least some idea of how it all works.
    If you’re curious about how you could apply it to your own WordPress site, I’ve collected some research, articles and experiments specific to my experience here: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/
    February 20, 2019 at 12:46PM

    The feed readers. Just as the RSS standard spawned lots of “reader” and “aggregator” software, so there should be similar feed readers for the various data standards described in (1) and the publishers described in (2). While publishers might have built-in readers (as the social media giants all do), the publishing and reading feature sets need to be kept independent, if you want a completely decentralized system.  ❧

    I’ve outlined a bit about how feed readers could be slighly modified to do some of this in the past: https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
    February 20, 2019 at 12:47PM

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35. Below are a list of people who have either sent me explicit notifications (or Webmentions) that they’re following me (via my website) or who have listed me on a blogroll or are using other means on their websites to indicate that they’re following some portion of my posts on this website.
    In some sense, this is a sketch for a Followers page as typically seen on many social media silo websites. Ideally the UI and set up will improve in the future, but since I had some preliminary data, I thought I’d mock up the page to get others thinking about how to begin creating such pages for themselves. Perhaps in the future I’ll modify the page slightly to represent “friends” as well using a similar sort of following set up, but which would ideally take into account XFN data that they include on their links as well.
    If you’d like to follow me and be listed here, feel free to make your follow post on your own website (here’s some examples of my follow posts), or add me to your blogroll or your own following page. If your page has  either my homepage web address or this page’s address (URL) on it, you can add your page’s address in the field below and click “Ping me” to have yourself added to the list. 
    If you’d like to see who I’m following from my website or in my favorite readers, take a look at my personal Following Page.

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36. I’ve had a following page (aka blogroll on acid) where I list all the websites I’m following in my feed reader (along with OPML files for those who’d like to quickly follow them as well), but last night I quickly mocked up a followers page as well. It lists people who have either added me to their blogrolls or who have sent my site notifications (trackbacks, pingbacks, or webmentions) that they’re following me.
    This is another in a long line of social media functionalities that I’m now able to relatively easily support on my own website.
    To my knowledge, I may be the first person to be displaying “following” webmentions anywhere. The nice part is that this following webmention functionality is built into the Post Kinds plugin by default, so that if people begin creating follow posts on a more regular basis, then several hundred WordPress sites that have Post Kinds will automatically be able to display them.

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37. I’ve had a following page (aka blogroll on acid) where I list all the websites I’m following in my feed reader (along with OPML files for those who’d like to quickly follow them as well), but last night I quickly mocked up a followers page as well. It lists people who have either added me to their blogrolls or who have sent my site notifications (trackbacks, pingbacks, or webmentions) that they’re following me.
    This is another in a long line of social media functionalities that I’m now able to relatively easily support on my own website.
    To my knowledge, I may be the first person to be displaying “following” webmentions anywhere. The nice part is that this following webmention functionality is built into the Post Kinds plugin by default, so that if people begin creating follow posts on a more regular basis, then several hundred WordPress sites that have Post Kinds will automatically be able to display them.

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38. Replied to a tweet by Laura Gibbs (Twitter)

    pinging @btopro …do you know about @Inoreader? it’s like the old Google Reader plus the old Yahoo Pipes for remixing (INCREDIBLE remixing) of RSS feeds that you can then send back out as RSS or as HTML clips, which is how I get my blog network to display in different web spaces— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) March 30, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    I’m curious if you use Inoreader’s OPML subscription functionality at all? It’s kind of like Twitter lists in a sense, but a lot more open and distributed.
    Much like your version piped into an LMS, it could be used used to create a planet of all of the participants in a course, but set up in such a way that only one person needs to create and maintain an OPML file that everyone else can use instead of needing to manually find and subscribe to a bunch of feeds or worry about missing out on that one feed of the student who joined the course two weeks late.
    As an example, here’s an OPML file on my own website (through my following page) of all the educators I’m following who are tangentially involved in the IndieWeb movement. If you subscribe to the OPML file in Inoreader, when I update it with additional feeds, you get all the changes synced automatically.
    I’d be interested to see exactly how you’re using Inoreader–particularly the off-label methods. Have you written up any of the details anywhere? It looks like you’re using tags in Inoreader and piping those details back to the LMS so that you can filter portions of the class content?
    I recently documented some of my personal use here: Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader. A big portion of it is about being able to use Inoreader to interact within its interface, but also have those interactions reflected on my own website (aka digital commonplace book) which sends notifications to the original content on the web instead of just leaving it siloed within Inoreader.

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39. Replied to My Human Readable OPML Blogroll by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

    After my recent posting where I asked people which RSS feeds they read, I received several responses. One of them is Peter’s. Like me he was publishing an OPML file of his feeds already. OPML is a machine readable format that most RSS readers will be able to import, so you can subscribe to blogs I…

    Ton, this is great! Though perhaps you’re reinventing the wheel a bit more than you may have needed to?
    I’ll see you your blogroll and add in images and descriptions as well! https://boffosocko.com/about/following/
    A while back I did something similar to what you and Peter have done, I just did it with the old built in Link Manager feature of WordPress. The primary difference is that I’ve got some meta data about what the site/feed is about in addition to an image. I left out the feed in the human readable version as it’s less likely to be used, while it’s more valuable to the computer readable version. I’ve also figured out the a URL query parameter for breaking my blogroll up by category, so that folks can copy smaller subsections of it.
    Another added bonus is that I’m using Inoreader which supports OPML subscriptions so that any time I update my OPML file, my feed reader auto-updates for me without needing to manually upload the new OPML file! This means I just add the follow in one place and everything else follows without any additional work.
    Here are the details for how I did most of it:

    The beginnings of a blogroll
    A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
    OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager

    Perhaps what we really need is to give some love to that Link Manager in core to update it to OPML v2 and add in the rel attributes from XFN microformats to the links? 
    When you have a moment, be sure to add your example to the OPML and blogroll pages on the IndieWeb wiki, where you may find some additional inspiration.
    Thanks for experimenting to bring back the blogroll! (And thanks for sharing, there are a few of your feeds I see that I ought to be following and I also recognize those we have in common of many educators I already do follow.)

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40. I’m still tinkering away at pathways for following people (and websites) on the open web (in my case within WordPress). I’m doing it with an eye toward making some of the UI and infrastructure easier in light of the current fleet of Microsub servers and readers that will enable easier social reading without the centralized reliance on services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, LinkedIn, et al.
    If you haven’t been following along, here are some relevant pieces for background:

    The beginnings of a blogroll
    A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
    OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager

    Was WP Links the Perfect Blogroll All Along? by Ton Zijlstra

    Generally I’ve been adding data into my Following Page (aka blogroll on steroids) using the old WordPress Links Manager pseudo-manually. (There’s also a way to bulk import to it via OPML, using the WordPress Tools Menu or via /wp-admin/import.php?import=opml). The old Links Manager functionality in WordPress had a bookmarklet to add links to it quickly, though it currently only seems to add a minimal set–typically just the URL and the page title. Perhaps someone with stronger JavaScript skills than I possess could improve on it or integrate/leverage some of David Shanske’s Parse This work into such a bookmark to pull more data out of pages (via Microformats, Schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, or Dublin Core meta) to pre-fill the Links Manager with more metadata including page feeds, which I now understand Parse This does in the past month or so. (If more than one feed is found, they could be added in comma separated form to the “Notes” section and the user could cut/paste the appropriate one into the feed section.) Since I spent some significant time trying to find/dig up that old bookmarklet, I’ll mention that it can be found in the Restore Lost Functionality plugin (along with many other goodies) and a related version also exists in the Link Library plugin, though on a small test I found it only pulled in the URL.
    Since it wasn’t completely intuitive to find, I’ll include the JavaScript snippet for the Links Manager bookmarklet below, though note that the URL hard coded into it is for example.com, so change that part if you’re modifying for your own use. (I haven’t tested it, but it may require the Press This plugin which replaces some of the functionality that was taken out of WordPress core in version 4.9. It will certainly require one to enable using the Links Manager either via code or via plugin.)
    javascript:void(linkmanpopup=window.open('https://exanple.com/wp-admin/link-add.php?action=popup&linkurl='+escape(location.href)+'&name='+escape(document.title),'LinkManager','scrollbars=yes,width=750,height=550,left=15,top=15,status=yes,resizable=yes'));linkmanpopup.focus();window.focus();linkmanpopup.focus();
    Since I’ve been digging around a bit, I’ll note that Yannick Lefebvre’s Link Library plugin seems to have a similar sort of functionality to Links Manager and adds in the ability to add a variety of additional data fields including tags, which Ton Zijlstra mentions he would like (and I wouldn’t mind either). Unfortunately I’m not seeing any OPML functionality in the plugin, so it wins at doing display (with a huge variety of settings) for a stand-alone blogroll, but it may fail at the data portability for doing the additional OPML portion we’ve been looking at. Of course I’m happy to be corrected, but I don’t see anything in the documentation or a cursory glance at the code.
    In the most ideal world, I’d love to be able to use the Post Kinds Plugin to create follow posts (see my examples). This plugin is already able to generally use bookmarklet functionality to pull in a variety of meta data using the Parse This code which is also built into Post Kinds.
    It would be nice if these follow posts would also copy their data into the Links Manager (to keep things DRY), so that the blogroll and the OPML files are automatically updated all at once. (Barring Post Kinds transferring the data, it would be nice to have an improved bookmarklet for pulling data into the Links Manager piece directly.)
    Naturally having the ability for these OPML files be readable/usable by Jack Jamieson’s forthcoming Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (for use with social readers) would be phenomenal. (I believe there are already one or two OPML to h-feed converters for Microsub in the wild.) All of this would be a nice end -to-end solution for quickly and easily following people (or sites) with a variety of feeds and feed types (RSS, Atom, JSONfeed, h-feed).
    An additional refinement of the blogroll display portion would be to have that page display as an h-feed of h-entries each including properly marked up h-cards with appropriate microformats and discoverable RSS feeds to make it easier for other sites to find and use that data. (This may be a more IndieWeb-based method of displaying such a page compared with the OPML spec.) I’ll also note that the Links Manager uses v1 of the OPML spec and it would potentially be nice to have an update on that as well for newer discovery tools/methods like Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML Subscription list, which I’m noting seems to be down/not functioning at the moment.

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41. My OPML Domains Project
    Not being able to attend Domains 2019 in person, I was bound and determined to attend as much of it as I could manage remotely. A lot of this revolved around following the hashtag for the conference, watching the Virtually Connecting sessions, interacting online, and starting to watch the archived videos after-the-fact. Even with all of this, for a while I had been meaning to flesh out my ability to follow the domains (aka websites) of other attendees and people in the space. Currently the easiest way (for me) to do this is via RSS with a feed reader, so I began collecting feeds of those from the Twitter list of Domains ’17 and Domains ’19 attendees as well as others in the education-related space who tweet about A Domain of One’s Own or IndieWeb. In some sense, I would be doing some additional aggregation work on expanding my blogroll, or, as I call it now, my following page since it’s much too large and diverse to fit into a sidebar on my website.
    For some brief background, my following page is built on some old functionality in WordPress core that has since been hidden. I’m using the old Links Manager for collecting links and feeds of people, projects, groups, and institutions. This link manager creates standard OPML files, which WordPress can break up by categories, that can easily be imported/exported into most standard feed readers. Even better, some feed readers like Inoreader, support OPML subscriptions, so one could subscribe to my OPML file, and any time I update it in the future with new subscriptions, your feed reader would automatically update to follow those as well. I use this functionality in my own Inoreader account, so that any new subscriptions I add to my own site are simply synced to my feed reader without needing to be separately added or updated.
    The best part of creating such a list and publishing it in a standard format is that you, dear reader, don’t need to spend the several hours I did to find, curate, and compile the list to recreate it for yourself, but you can now download it, modify it if necessary, and have a copy for yourself in just a few minutes. (Toward that end, I’m also happy to update it or make additions if others think it’s missing anyone interesting in the space–feedback, questions, and comments are heartily encouraged.) You can see a human-readable version of the list at this link, or find the computer parse-able/feed reader subscribe-able link here.
    To make it explicit, I’ll also note that these lists also help me to keep up with people and changes in the timeframe between conferences.
    Anecdotal Domains observations
    In executing this OPML project I noticed some interesting things about the Domains community at large (or at least those who are avid enough to travel and attend in person or actively engage online). I’ll lay these out below. Perhaps at a future date, I’ll do a more explicit capture of the data with some analysis.
    The largest majority of sites I came across were, unsurprisingly, WordPress-based, which made it much easier to find RSS feeds to read/consume material. I could simply take a domain name and add /feed/ to the end of the URL, and voilà, a relatively quick follow!
    There are a lot of people whose sites didn’t have obvious links to their feeds. To me this is a desperate tragedy for the open web. We’re already behind the eight ball compared to social media and corporate controlled sites, why make it harder for people to read/consume our content from our own domains? And as if to add insult to injury, the places on one’s website where an RSS feed link/icon would typically live were instead populated by links to corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In a few cases I also saw legacy links to Google+ which ended service and disappeared from the web along with a tremendous number of online identities and personal data on April 2, 2019. (Here’s a reminder to remove those if you’ve forgotten.) For those who are also facing this problem, there’s a fantastic service called SubToMe that has a universal follow button that can be installed or which works well with a browser bookmarklet and a wide variety of feed readers.
    I was thrilled to see a few people were using interesting alternate content management systems/site generators like WithKnown and Grav. There were  also several people who had branched out to static site generators (sites without a database). This sort of plurality is a great thing for the community and competition in the space for sites, design, user experience, etc. is awesome. It’s thrilling to see people in the Domains space taking advantage of alternate options, experimenting with them, and using them in the wild.

    lol, I agree #domains19 pic.twitter.com/aMdwJlhogr
    — Lauren Brumfield (@brumface) June 10, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    I’ll note that I did see a few poor souls who were using Wix. I know there was at least one warning about Wix at the conference, but in case it wasn’t stated explicitly, Wix does not support exporting data, which makes any potential future migration of sites difficult. Definitely don’t use it for any extended writing, as cutting and pasting more than a few simple static pages becomes onerous. To make matters worse, Wix doesn’t offer any sort of back up service, so if they chose to shut your site off for any reason, you’d be completely out of luck. No back up + no export = I couldn’t recommend using.

    If your account or any of your services are cancelled, it may result in loss of content and data. You are responsible to back up your data and materials. —Wix Terms of Use

    I also noticed a few people had generic domain names that they didn’t really own (and not even in the sense of rental ownership). Here I’m talking about domain names of the form username.domainsproject.com. While I’m glad that they have a domain that they can use and generally control, it’s not one that they can truly exert full ownership over. (They just can’t pick it up and take it with them.) Even if they could export/import their data to another service or even a different content management system, all their old links would immediately disappear from the web. In the case of students, while it’s nice that their school may provide this space, it is more problematic for data portability and longevity on the web that they’ll eventually lose that institutional domain name when they graduate. On the other hand, if you have something like yourname.com as your digital home, you can export/import, change content management services, hosting companies, etc. and all your content will still resolve and you’ll be imminently more find-able by your friends and colleagues. This choice is essentially the internet equivalent of changing cellular providers from Sprint to AT&T but taking your phone number with you–you may change providers, but people will still know where to find you without being any the wiser about your service provider changes. I think that for allowing students and faculty the ability to more easily move their content and their sites, Domains projects should require individual custom domains.
    If you don’t own/control your physical domain name, you’re prone to lose a lot of value built up in your permalinks. I’m also reminded of here of the situation encountered by faculty who move from one university to another. (Congratulations by the way to Martha Burtis on the pending move to Plymouth State. You’ll notice she won’t face this problem.)  There’s also the situation of Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins whose institutional website was taken down by his university when the National Security Agency flagged an apparent issue. Fortunately in his case, he had his own separate domain name and content on an external server and his institutional account was just a mirrored copy of his own domain.

    If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
    —Mel Brooks from The Producers (1968), obviously with the it being a referent to A Domain of One’s Own.

    Also during my project, I noted that quite a lot of people don’t list their own personal/professional domains within their Twitter or other social media profiles. This seems a glaring omission particularly for at least one whose Twitter bio creatively and proactively claims that they’re an avid proponent of A Domain of One’s Own.
    And finally there were a small–but still reasonable–number of people within the community for whom I couldn’t find their domain at all! A small number assuredly are new to the space or exploring it, and so I’d give a pass, but I was honestly shocked that some just didn’t.
    (Caveat: I’ll freely admit that the value of Domains is that one has ultimate control including the right not to have or use one or even to have a private, hidden, and completely locked down one, just the way that Dalton chose not to walk in the conformity scene in The Dead Poet’s Society. But even with this in mind, how can we ethically recommend this pathway to students, friends, and colleagues if we’re not willing to participate ourselves?)
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_htuCMCqM?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent&w=840&h=473%5D
    Too much Twitter & a challenge for the next Domains Conference
    One of the things that shocked me most at a working conference about the idea of A Domain of One’s Own within education where there was more than significant time given to the ideas of privacy, tracking, and surveillance, was the extent that nearly everyone present gave up their identity, authority, and digital autonomy to Twitter, a company which actively represents almost every version of the poor ethics, surveillance, tracking, and design choices we all abhor within the edtech space.
    Why weren’t people proactively using their own domains to communicate instead? Why weren’t their notes, observations, highlights, bookmarks, likes, reposts, etc. posted to their own websites? Isn’t that part of what we’re in all this for?!
    One of the shining examples from Domains 2019 that I caught as it was occurring was John Stewart’s site where he was aggregating talk titles, abstracts, notes, and other details relevant to himself and his practice. He then published them in the open and syndicated the copies to Twitter where the rest of the conversation seemed to be happening. His living notebook– or digital commmonplace book if you will–is of immense value not only to him, but to all who are able to access it. But you may ask, “Chris, didn’t you notice them on Twitter first?” In fact, I did not! I caught them because I was following the live feed of some of the researchers, educators, and technologists I follow in my feed reader using the OPML files mentioned above. I would submit, especially as a remote participant/follower of the conversation, that his individual posts were worth 50 or more individual tweets. Just the additional context they contained made them proverbially worth their weight in gold.
    Perhaps for the next conference, we might build a planet or site that could aggregate all the feeds of people’s domains using their categories/tags or other means to create our own version of the Twitter stream? Alternately, by that time, I suspect that work on some of the new IndieWeb readers will have solidified to allow people to read feeds and interact with that content directly and immediately in much the way Twitter works now except that all the interaction will occur on our own domains.

    Seeing good examples of existing domains is crucial for showing students what is possible in creating their own domain, says @CassieNooyen #domains19
    — Mo Pelzel (@MorrisPelzel) June 10, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    As educators, one of the most valuable things we can and should do is model appropriate behavior for students. I think it’s high time that when attending a professional conference about A Domain of One’s Own that we all ought to be actively doing it using our own domains. Maybe we could even quit putting our Twitter handles on our slides, and just put our domain names on them instead?
    Of course, I wouldn’t and couldn’t suggest or even ask others to do this if I weren’t willing and able to do it myself.  So as a trial and proof of concept, I’ve actively posted all my interactions related to Domains 2019 that I was interested in to my own website using the tag Domains 2019.  At that URL, you’ll find all the things I liked and bookmarked, as well as the bits of conversation on Twitter and others’ sites that I’ve commented on or replied to. All of it originated on my own domain, and, when it appeared on Twitter, it was syndicated only secondarily so that others would see it since that was where the conversation was generally being aggregated. You can almost go back and recreate my entire Domains 2019 experience in real time by following my posts, notes, and details on my personal website.
    So, next time around can we make an attempt to dump Twitter!? The technology for pulling it off certainly already exists, and is reasonably well-supported by WordPress, WithKnown, Grav, and even some of the static site generators I noticed in my brief survey above. (Wix obviously doesn’t even come close…)
    I’m more than happy to help people build and flesh out the infrastructure necessary to try to make the jump. Even if just a few of us began doing it, we could serve as that all-important model for others as well as for our students and other constituencies. With a bit of help and effort before the next Domains Conference, I’ll bet we could collectively pull it off. I think many of us are either well- or even over-versed in the toxicities and surveillance underpinnings of social media, learning management systems, and other digital products in the edtech space, but now we ought to attempt a move away from it with an infrastructure that is our own–our Domains.

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42. My OPML Domains Project
    Not being able to attend Domains 2019 in person, I was bound and determined to attend as much of it as I could manage remotely. A lot of this revolved around following the hashtag for the conference, watching the Virtually Connecting sessions, interacting online, and starting to watch the archived videos after-the-fact. Even with all of this, for a while I had been meaning to flesh out my ability to follow the domains (aka websites) of other attendees and people in the space. Currently the easiest way (for me) to do this is via RSS with a feed reader, so I began collecting feeds of those from the Twitter list of Domains ’17 and Domains ’19 attendees as well as others in the education-related space who tweet about A Domain of One’s Own or IndieWeb. In some sense, I would be doing some additional aggregation work on expanding my blogroll, or, as I call it now, my following page since it’s much too large and diverse to fit into a sidebar on my website.
    For some brief background, my following page is built on some old functionality in WordPress core that has since been hidden. I’m using the old Links Manager for collecting links and feeds of people, projects, groups, and institutions. This link manager creates standard OPML files, which WordPress can break up by categories, that can easily be imported/exported into most standard feed readers. Even better, some feed readers like Inoreader, support OPML subscriptions, so one could subscribe to my OPML file, and any time I update it in the future with new subscriptions, your feed reader would automatically update to follow those as well. I use this functionality in my own Inoreader account, so that any new subscriptions I add to my own site are simply synced to my feed reader without needing to be separately added or updated.
    The best part of creating such a list and publishing it in a standard format is that you, dear reader, don’t need to spend the several hours I did to find, curate, and compile the list to recreate it for yourself, but you can now download it, modify it if necessary, and have a copy for yourself in just a few minutes. (Toward that end, I’m also happy to update it or make additions if others think it’s missing anyone interesting in the space–feedback, questions, and comments are heartily encouraged.) You can see a human-readable version of the list at this link, or find the computer parse-able/feed reader subscribe-able link here.
    To make it explicit, I’ll also note that these lists also help me to keep up with people and changes in the timeframe between conferences.
    Anecdotal Domains observations
    In executing this OPML project I noticed some interesting things about the Domains community at large (or at least those who are avid enough to travel and attend in person or actively engage online). I’ll lay these out below. Perhaps at a future date, I’ll do a more explicit capture of the data with some analysis.
    The largest majority of sites I came across were, unsurprisingly, WordPress-based, which made it much easier to find RSS feeds to read/consume material. I could simply take a domain name and add /feed/ to the end of the URL, and voilà, a relatively quick follow!
    There are a lot of people whose sites didn’t have obvious links to their feeds. To me this is a desperate tragedy for the open web. We’re already behind the eight ball compared to social media and corporate controlled sites, why make it harder for people to read/consume our content from our own domains? And as if to add insult to injury, the places on one’s website where an RSS feed link/icon would typically live were instead populated by links to corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In a few cases I also saw legacy links to Google+ which ended service and disappeared from the web along with a tremendous number of online identities and personal data on April 2, 2019. (Here’s a reminder to remove those if you’ve forgotten.) For those who are also facing this problem, there’s a fantastic service called SubToMe that has a universal follow button that can be installed or which works well with a browser bookmarklet and a wide variety of feed readers.
    I was thrilled to see a few people were using interesting alternate content management systems/site generators like WithKnown and Grav. There were  also several people who had branched out to static site generators (sites without a database). This sort of plurality is a great thing for the community and competition in the space for sites, design, user experience, etc. is awesome. It’s thrilling to see people in the Domains space taking advantage of alternate options, experimenting with them, and using them in the wild.

    lol, I agree #domains19 pic.twitter.com/aMdwJlhogr
    — Lauren Brumfield (@brumface) June 10, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    I’ll note that I did see a few poor souls who were using Wix. I know there was at least one warning about Wix at the conference, but in case it wasn’t stated explicitly, Wix does not support exporting data, which makes any potential future migration of sites difficult. Definitely don’t use it for any extended writing, as cutting and pasting more than a few simple static pages becomes onerous. To make matters worse, Wix doesn’t offer any sort of back up service, so if they chose to shut your site off for any reason, you’d be completely out of luck. No back up + no export = I couldn’t recommend using.

    If your account or any of your services are cancelled, it may result in loss of content and data. You are responsible to back up your data and materials. —Wix Terms of Use

    I also noticed a few people had generic domain names that they didn’t really own (and not even in the sense of rental ownership). Here I’m talking about domain names of the form username.domainsproject.com. While I’m glad that they have a domain that they can use and generally control, it’s not one that they can truly exert full ownership over. (They just can’t pick it up and take it with them.) Even if they could export/import their data to another service or even a different content management system, all their old links would immediately disappear from the web. In the case of students, while it’s nice that their school may provide this space, it is more problematic for data portability and longevity on the web that they’ll eventually lose that institutional domain name when they graduate. On the other hand, if you have something like yourname.com as your digital home, you can export/import, change content management services, hosting companies, etc. and all your content will still resolve and you’ll be imminently more find-able by your friends and colleagues. This choice is essentially the internet equivalent of changing cellular providers from Sprint to AT&T but taking your phone number with you–you may change providers, but people will still know where to find you without being any the wiser about your service provider changes. I think that for allowing students and faculty the ability to more easily move their content and their sites, Domains projects should require individual custom domains.
    If you don’t own/control your physical domain name, you’re prone to lose a lot of value built up in your permalinks. I’m also reminded of here of the situation encountered by faculty who move from one university to another. (Congratulations by the way to Martha Burtis on the pending move to Plymouth State. You’ll notice she won’t face this problem.)  There’s also the situation of Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins whose institutional website was taken down by his university when the National Security Agency flagged an apparent issue. Fortunately in his case, he had his own separate domain name and content on an external server and his institutional account was just a mirrored copy of his own domain.

    If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
    —Mel Brooks from The Producers (1968), obviously with the it being a referent to A Domain of One’s Own.

    Also during my project, I noted that quite a lot of people don’t list their own personal/professional domains within their Twitter or other social media profiles. This seems a glaring omission particularly for at least one whose Twitter bio creatively and proactively claims that they’re an avid proponent of A Domain of One’s Own.
    And finally there were a small–but still reasonable–number of people within the community for whom I couldn’t find their domain at all! A small number assuredly are new to the space or exploring it, and so I’d give a pass, but I was honestly shocked that some just didn’t.
    (Caveat: I’ll freely admit that the value of Domains is that one has ultimate control including the right not to have or use one or even to have a private, hidden, and completely locked down one, just the way that Dalton chose not to walk in the conformity scene in The Dead Poet’s Society. But even with this in mind, how can we ethically recommend this pathway to students, friends, and colleagues if we’re not willing to participate ourselves?)
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_htuCMCqM?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent&w=840&h=473%5D
    Too much Twitter & a challenge for the next Domains Conference
    One of the things that shocked me most at a working conference about the idea of A Domain of One’s Own within education where there was more than significant time given to the ideas of privacy, tracking, and surveillance, was the extent that nearly everyone present gave up their identity, authority, and digital autonomy to Twitter, a company which actively represents almost every version of the poor ethics, surveillance, tracking, and design choices we all abhor within the edtech space.
    Why weren’t people proactively using their own domains to communicate instead? Why weren’t their notes, observations, highlights, bookmarks, likes, reposts, etc. posted to their own websites? Isn’t that part of what we’re in all this for?!
    One of the shining examples from Domains 2019 that I caught as it was occurring was John Stewart’s site where he was aggregating talk titles, abstracts, notes, and other details relevant to himself and his practice. He then published them in the open and syndicated the copies to Twitter where the rest of the conversation seemed to be happening. His living notebook– or digital commmonplace book if you will–is of immense value not only to him, but to all who are able to access it. But you may ask, “Chris, didn’t you notice them on Twitter first?” In fact, I did not! I caught them because I was following the live feed of some of the researchers, educators, and technologists I follow in my feed reader using the OPML files mentioned above. I would submit, especially as a remote participant/follower of the conversation, that his individual posts were worth 50 or more individual tweets. Just the additional context they contained made them proverbially worth their weight in gold.
    Perhaps for the next conference, we might build a planet or site that could aggregate all the feeds of people’s domains using their categories/tags or other means to create our own version of the Twitter stream? Alternately, by that time, I suspect that work on some of the new IndieWeb readers will have solidified to allow people to read feeds and interact with that content directly and immediately in much the way Twitter works now except that all the interaction will occur on our own domains.

    Seeing good examples of existing domains is crucial for showing students what is possible in creating their own domain, says @CassieNooyen #domains19
    — Mo Pelzel (@MorrisPelzel) June 10, 2019

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
    As educators, one of the most valuable things we can and should do is model appropriate behavior for students. I think it’s high time that when attending a professional conference about A Domain of One’s Own that we all ought to be actively doing it using our own domains. Maybe we could even quit putting our Twitter handles on our slides, and just put our domain names on them instead?
    Of course, I wouldn’t and couldn’t suggest or even ask others to do this if I weren’t willing and able to do it myself.  So as a trial and proof of concept, I’ve actively posted all my interactions related to Domains 2019 that I was interested in to my own website using the tag Domains 2019.  At that URL, you’ll find all the things I liked and bookmarked, as well as the bits of conversation on Twitter and others’ sites that I’ve commented on or replied to. All of it originated on my own domain, and, when it appeared on Twitter, it was syndicated only secondarily so that others would see it since that was where the conversation was generally being aggregated. You can almost go back and recreate my entire Domains 2019 experience in real time by following my posts, notes, and details on my personal website.
    So, next time around can we make an attempt to dump Twitter!? The technology for pulling it off certainly already exists, and is reasonably well-supported by WordPress, WithKnown, Grav, and even some of the static site generators I noticed in my brief survey above. (Wix obviously doesn’t even come close…)
    I’m more than happy to help people build and flesh out the infrastructure necessary to try to make the jump. Even if just a few of us began doing it, we could serve as that all-important model for others as well as for our students and other constituencies. With a bit of help and effort before the next Domains Conference, I’ll bet we could collectively pull it off. I think many of us are either well- or even over-versed in the toxicities and surveillance underpinnings of social media, learning management systems, and other digital products in the edtech space, but now we ought to attempt a move away from it with an infrastructure that is our own–our Domains.

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43. I dislike the holier-than-thou attitude of Cancel Culture. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff.…

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44. Replied to a post by @bix (micro.blog)

    I’ve started building a list of blogs and newsletters, although currently it’s just a subset of my full list of subscriptions. I’ll add more as I decide what I’m going to continue to follow longterm. The inclusion of newsletters is why it’s not a “blogroll”.

    @bix, it’s interesting to see others experimenting with these sorts of things. I hadn’t thought of adding any newsletters (and I don’t subscribe to more than one or two), but I’ve built a huge, categorized following page which includes OPML subscription links as well. 
    There are some details and links to how I did it in WordPress for those who are interested: From Following Posts and Blogrolls (Following Pages) with OPML to Microsub servers and Readers.

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45. Replied to Five RSS feeds I followed today by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

    I followed several new to me feeds today and then decided—why not share? There may be no other way to rediscover the social network that is blogging.

    Jeremy, it’s great to see someone else following peoples’ content directly from their own websites! I was surprised (but maybe not really) to see that some of the feeds you had followed were those from the IndieWeb community! Did you happen to catch Tantek’s talk at WordCamp US (▶️) just before the State of the Word?
    Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:

    Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.

    I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.
    If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.
    I’m curious what feed reader you use for subscriptions? I wrote a short note the other day about some interesting new developments I’ve been seeing in the feed reader and discovery space.

    And last, but not least, I followed both the IndieNews and This Week in the IndieWeb blogs via the main indieweb.org site as part of an effort to get more familiar with that community and technology.

    If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.
    In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.
    And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.

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46. I just finished adding OPML export to Dobrado, a.k.a how to get your follow list out of a reader. I’ve been trying to switch my daily reading habits from my old account on unicyclic.com, to my new website at mblaney.xyz, but the new way of reading is via a Microsub client which has been quite buggy up until now!

    I’ve been using both every day for a few weeks to get the kinks out of the new code, and I’m pretty happy with it. The only thing that was missing was that I hadn’t bothered following all the same feeds again, I decided to leave that until I could export them properly from my old account and import them to the new website.

    Around the same time I was chatting with Chris, who has a mammoth following page with links to his OPML files. He recently had a go at importing them into unicyclic.com, which didn’t get very far, but this was good timing as I was already working on it. There are still a few issues with network requests timing out but I think it’s much better.

    Dobrado now exports a similar OPML file to what Chris has created, which groups feeds by category. The import function now checks for categories and will use them to create Microsub channels as required.

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47. Read Publicly Sharing RSS Libraries i.e. My RSS Feeds are Yours by Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)

    Inspired by Matt Haughey’s public posting of the RSS Feeds he subscribes to, I’m doing the same (below).
    What is RSS, you ask? A method to subscribe to what your favorite websites publish and have their updates all in a single place. Think of it as DVR for the Internet, food delivery instead of pickup except for the web. Podcasts would on the same technology and concept: Subscribe once, receive forever without asking again.

    Lately though, its been making a bit of a comeback. Idea being that self-selecting your daily information diet (see: No Trump-loving-creepy-brothers-in-laws) probably means less unwilling toxicity and restless nights of non-sleep. ❧

    –highlighted December 08, 2019 at 04:26PM
    This is the third time I’ve heard about RSS coming back in almost as many days, and this not long after highlighting some recent advancements in feed readers. (One of the others was Jeremy Keith at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in San Francisco.) Kevin highlights a fantastic reason why using a feed reader can be important and more healthy than relying on the social aggregation algorithms in your not-so-friendly-neighborhood social media platforms.
    Like Kevin and Matt, I think it’s a nice thing to share one’s sources and feeds. A while back I created a following page where I share a huge list of the people and sources I’m following regularly via RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, JSONFeed, and even h-feed. Everytime I follow or unfollow a source, the page auto-updates. I also provide OPML files (at the bottom of that page) so you can import them into your own feed reader. If you’re using a feed reader like Inoreader that supports OPML subscription, you can input the OPML file location and your copy of my feeds will automatically update when I make changes.
    Happy reading!

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48. Read Publicly Sharing RSS Libraries i.e. My RSS Feeds are Yours by Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)

    Inspired by Matt Haughey’s public posting of the RSS Feeds he subscribes to, I’m doing the same (below).
    What is RSS, you ask? A method to subscribe to what your favorite websites publish and have their updates all in a single place. Think of it as DVR for the Internet, food delivery instead of pickup except for the web. Podcasts would on the same technology and concept: Subscribe once, receive forever without asking again.

    Lately though, its been making a bit of a comeback. Idea being that self-selecting your daily information diet (see: No Trump-loving-creepy-brothers-in-laws) probably means less unwilling toxicity and restless nights of non-sleep. ❧

    –highlighted December 08, 2019 at 04:26PM
    This is the third time I’ve heard about RSS coming back in almost as many days, and this not long after highlighting some recent advancements in feed readers. (One of the others was Jeremy Keith at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in San Francisco.) Kevin highlights a fantastic reason why using a feed reader can be important and more healthy than relying on the social aggregation algorithms in your not-so-friendly-neighborhood social media platforms.
    Like Kevin and Matt, I think it’s a nice thing to share one’s sources and feeds. A while back I created a following page where I share a huge list of the people and sources I’m following regularly via RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, JSONFeed, and even h-feed. Everytime I follow or unfollow a source, the page auto-updates. I also provide OPML files (at the bottom of that page) so you can import them into your own feed reader. If you’re using a feed reader like Inoreader that supports OPML subscription, you can input the OPML file location and your copy of my feeds will automatically update when I make changes.
    Happy reading!

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49. Replied to Networking as Time Saving by Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

    We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and “open” assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.
    I talked briefly about the “innovation” part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.
    A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed.  I have a column set up in Tweetdeck  where I’m following the # Domains19 conference.  With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I’m doing,  to see if anything looks interesting.  People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we’ve talked about.  Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.
    One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting.   I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn.  I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they’re doing.   If I don’t find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.
    And inevitably, over months and years, I’ll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they’re doing, about why they’re doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.
    This is the open web I hope we’re teaching our students about –  place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn. 

    Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel. 
    If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.

    Here’s the sub-list of relevant people: IndieWeb and Education

    The OPML file, which you can import into many readers, for the same: IndieWeb and Education (OPML)

    Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested. 

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50. Replied to Networking as Time Saving by Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

    We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and “open” assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.
    I talked briefly about the “innovation” part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.
    A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed.  I have a column set up in Tweetdeck  where I’m following the # Domains19 conference.  With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I’m doing,  to see if anything looks interesting.  People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we’ve talked about.  Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.
    One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting.   I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn.  I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they’re doing.   If I don’t find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.
    And inevitably, over months and years, I’ll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they’re doing, about why they’re doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.
    This is the open web I hope we’re teaching our students about –  place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn. 

    Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel. 
    If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.

    Here’s the sub-list of relevant people: IndieWeb and Education

    The OPML file, which you can import into many readers, for the same: IndieWeb and Education (OPML)

    Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested. 

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51. Replied to Networking as Time Saving by Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

    We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and “open” assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.
    I talked briefly about the “innovation” part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.
    A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed.  I have a column set up in Tweetdeck  where I’m following the # Domains19 conference.  With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I’m doing,  to see if anything looks interesting.  People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we’ve talked about.  Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.
    One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting.   I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn.  I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they’re doing.   If I don’t find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.
    And inevitably, over months and years, I’ll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they’re doing, about why they’re doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.
    This is the open web I hope we’re teaching our students about –  place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn. 

    Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel. 
    If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.

    Here’s the sub-list of relevant people: IndieWeb and Education

    The OPML file, which you can import into many readers, for the same: IndieWeb and Education (OPML)

    Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested. 

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52. If you still believe in #RSS as great technology for managing great reading/information, be willing to share your feed library publicibly. See @mathowie & @ChrisAldrich here as examples boffosocko.com/about/followin…

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53. This is a fascinating local news aggregator built by Chris Hardie. It’s somewhat reminiscent of my own local news aggregation work, though mine is in the form of a less accessible OPML file of local news feeds that one could subscribe to in a feed reader. It certainly took more work for him to build, but I’d also guess he’s got more people reading it than are taking advantage of my own set of curated feeds.

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54. Discovery can definitely be a bear. Interestingly I came to your tweet through a handful of related blogposts via a feedreader from a random OPML file, so apologies for the late reply.
    I keep an old school blogroll, but it got so big I made it an entire page. It’s split out by a few broad categories, but there are OPML linked files by category at the bottom to let you follow it all or pick your poisons. Hopefully you’ll find some fun and interesting gems hiding in there.
    You might find some interesting feeds by clicking around within Dave Winer’s http://feedbase.io/ which will uncover some interesting active feeds. Best yet, it has lots of OPML files everywhere so you can quickly follow a lot.
    Matthias Ott’s post Into the Personal-Website-Verse was at the top of Hacker News earlier this week. Both his post and the HN post have lists of people with websites that could be interesting and useful to follow for voices on the web.
    You also might take a look at some of the details and resources on the discovery, blogroll, and even webring pages within the IndieWeb wiki. Not to be missed is Kicks Condor’s hrefhunt. Andy Bell also had a project to highlight personalsit.es.
    In a somewhat related question, but from the other perspective (especially for journalism), I’m curious if you have any thoughts on: How to follow the complete output of journalists and other writers?
     
     

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55. Following (BoffoSocko)
    This is a list of websites and blogs to which I’m subscribed. This is part of my continuing progress for both owning and improving my own personal following list, ideally in an easy-to-use and
    Een voorbeeld van een uitgebreide lijst van mensen die hij volgt.

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56. Following (BoffoSocko)
    This is a list of websites and blogs to which I’m subscribed. This is part of my continuing progress for both owning and improving my own personal following list, ideally in an easy-to-use and
    Uitgebreide lijst van de mensen die hij volgt.

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57. Earlier today I filled out a survey for WNYC Studios’ podcasting. It was easy to fill out because I keep all the data on my website.
    For those interested, here are the podcasts I’m subscribed to: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Podcasts
    And here’s a running historical list of what I’ve actually listened to: https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/

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58. It’s great to see blogrolls slowly, but surely making a comeback! I’ve got one too. I’m curious if you provide an OPML file as well?

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59. Blogrolls? Those are like Twitter lists for the cognoscenti right? 😉
    Seriously, I’ve resurrected mine a while back too. And included sub-sectioned OPML files just for kicks.
    More details on the project and implications for the future: https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/18/from-following-posts-and-blogrolls-following-pages-with-opml-to-microsub-servers-and-readers/
     

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60. I finally mucked about a bit and updated my Following Page (aka blogroll) on my website.
    Because I was using some quirky gymnastics and a hacked up plugin, I’ve now been able to define a custom page and page content so that the explanation of the page appears at the top rather than at the bottom as before.
    Viva the blogroll! Viva OPML! Viva RSS!

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61. Today I exported all my YouTube subscriptions as an OPML file and imported them to my website’s following page (aka blogroll). I still have a bit of clean up to do to categorize and present them all the way I’d like, but I’ve got a huge start on it.
    I’m hoping now that I’ve cut the cord, I’ll be able to use my various feed readers to watch and stream more video content.
    It’s amazing how many inactive channels I was following. 
    Special thanks to Martijn van der Ven who had done some great research on YouTube Atom feeds and OPML and created documentation on the IndieWeb wiki YouTube page.

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62. I love nothing more than OPML related tools! I just finished exporting all of my YouTube subscriptions the other day, now I can get the RSS feeds from the websites of all the people I’m following on Twitter?! This is awesome. I’ll need to work out how I might be able to import it all into my following page.
    As I look at this wonderful little app, I can’t help but think at how nice it might be if they added the SubToMe universal following button for these. I haven’t looked in a while, but it’s possible that the Feed.ly integration for SubToMe needed a tweak to get it working again.

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63. I’m enamored of Aaron Parecki‘s Monocle reader. I can subscribe to almost anything I want, read it without interfering algorithms, and reply to posts directly in the reader, which uses Micropub to post those directly on my site, which has Webmentions to send notifications to those sites in turn.
    I’m similarly in love with an app version called Indigenous for Android.
    But really, who can have just one favorite?!? I also love: 

    Sia Karamalegos
    Kicks Condor
    Rachel Andrew
    Jacky Alciné

    They’ve not only got interesting sites, but they’re always doing cool things that are worth following.
    And if you want some other interesting ones to take a peek at, I have longer list (with RSS/OPML) at https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

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64. Great blog here to follow #todo

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65. The overall idea to make it easier to subscribe to a personal website is certainly a laudable one.
    Sadly the general concept presented here, while it sounds potentially useful, is far too little and misdirected. Hopefully better potential solutions are still not too late.
    First, let’s step back a moment. The bigger problem with feeds was that website designers and developers spent far too long in the format wars between RSS and Atom while the social media giants focused on cleaner and easier UI. This allowed the social silos to dramatically close the gap in functionality and usability. While website owners were spending time on formats and writing long articles about what RSS was, how it worked, and how to use it, the public lost interest. We need something really dramatic to regain this ground and /feeds just is not going to cut it.
    The first problem I see with this is that on it’s face /feeds both looks and sounds like code. No user really wants to interact with code if they don’t have to. Why not simply have a page or button called something much more user friendly like “subscribe” or “follow”? Almost every major social silo has a common pattern like this and has a simple “follow” button on every user’s page. A quick click and one is done with the transaction!
    Instead the solution offered here is to have not only yet-another-page but one that needs to be maintained. (As good as the /now idea may seem, the fact that it needs to be regularly and manually updated makes it a failure out of the gate. I’ll bet that less than half the /now pages out there have been updated in the last 6 months. I know mine hasn’t.) Worse, suppose I click over to a /feeds page, as an average person I’m still stuck with the additional burden of knowing or learning about what a feed reader is, why I’d need or want one, and then knowing what RSS is and how I might use that. I might see a one click option for Twitter or Mastodon, but then I’m a mile away from your website and unlikely to see you again in the noise of my Twitter feed which has many other lurking problems.
    One of the best solutions I’ve seen in the past few years is that posited by SubToMe.com  which provides a single, customizable, and universal follow button. One click and it automatically finds the feeds hidden in the page’s code and presents me with one or more options for following it in a feed reader. Once I’ve chosen a reader, it remembers my choice and makes the following pattern easier in future transactions. This is a far superior option over /feeds because it takes away a huge amount of cognitive burden for the user. As a developer, I’ve got a browser bookmarklet that provides this functionality for sites that don’t provide it for me. How nice would it be if browsers went back and offered such a one button collection mechanism?
    Want to give this a try? I’ve got a “Follow Me” button in the side bar of my website. And if that doesn’t float your boat, I’ve tinkered with other methods of subscribing to my content that you can find at my subscribe page. Some developers might not be too scared of what’s on my subscribe page (a /feed page by a slightly friendlier name), but less technically minded people are sure to have a dramatically different perspective.
    The other piece here that I might take umbrage with is the offering to provide feeds to subscriptions to alternate services like Twitter and Mastodon. (This doesn’t take into any account that RSS feeds of social services are positively atrocious, not to mention that attempting to access Marcus’ Twitter feed in RSS Box returns the interminable error message: “There was a problem talking to Twitter. Please try again in a moment.”) 
    Ideally I see a future in which every person has the ability to own both their own domain name and their content in a simple manner. If this happens and it’s easier to subscribe to the sites of my friends, then I don’t need corporate social media to intermediate the transactions on my behalf. I also don’t need them to intermediate what I’m actually seeing with their blackbox algorithmic feeds either.  Friends, family, and colleagues could simply come to my website and subscribe to all or portions of my content in which they’re interested. While I still presently syndicate some of my content to silos like Twitter and Mastodon for the ease of friends or family who don’t know about the technical side of potential solutions, I post everything on my website first where one can subscribe in a feed reader or by email. Subscriptions in Twitter or Mastodon, while nice to have, are just a poor simulacrum of the real things being served by my site in better ways with more context and a design that better reflects what I’d like to portray online. A /feed page is going to be a failure from the start if you’re going to cede all the subsequent power directly to Twitter, Mastodon, and others anyway.
    While I like the volume of the reactions to the post (indicating that there’s not only a readership, but a desire for this sort of functionality), I’m disheartened that so many designers and developers think that the idea of /feeds is “enough” to stem the tide.
    For those who might be truly interested in designing our way out of this problem, I’d recommend looking at some of the design and development work of the IndieWeb community which is trying (slowly, but surely) to improve these sorts of technical hurdles. Their wiki has large number of examples of things that do and don’t work, discussion of where problems lie, and a community conversing about how to potentially make them better through actual examples of things that are currently working on peoples’ websites.
    A good example of this is the increasing improvement of social readers that allow one to subscribe to a variety of sources in a reader which also allows one to respond to posts in-line and then own that content on one’s website. If I can subscribe to almost anything out there in one interface and sort and filter it in any way I’d like, that’s far better than having twenty different feed readers named Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Soundcloud, etc. which I have to separately and independent manage and check. Now I’ve yet to see an IndieWeb reader with a one click SubToMe-type of solution for adding feeds to it, but I don’t think it will be very long before that’s a reality. The slowly improving Microsub spec that splits some of the heavy lifting needed to build and design a stand alone feed reader is certainly helping to make some massive headway on these issues.
    Maybe we’ll soon have an easy way for people to post who they’re following on their own websites, and their readers will be able to read or parse those pages and aggregate those followed posts directly into a nice reading interface? Maybe someone will figure out a way to redesign or re-imagine the old blogroll? Maybe we’ll leverage the idea of OPML subscriptions so that a personal blogroll (maybe we rename this something friendlier like a following page or personal recommendations, subscriptions, etc.) can feed a person’s subscriptions into their social reader? There are certainly a lot of solid ideas being experimented on and in actual use out there. 
    We obviously still have a long way to go to make things better and more usable, not only for ourselves as designers and developers, but for the coding averse. I feel like there’s already a flourishing space out there doing this that’s miles ahead of solutions like /feeds. Why don’t we start at that point and then move forward?

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66. RSS is such a great topic. I can’t wait to see what your perspective is on it.
    One of my favorite resources is the IndieWeb wiki page for RSS as it’s got some good pros/cons, alternate methods for feeds that don’t require side files, conversion tools, and miscellanea.
    I’ve always loved the way that platforms like WordPress provide RSS feeds for so many moving parts including authors, comments, dates, tags, categories and various combinations of these. This is a bit reminiscent of Huffduffer, a bookmarking site for audio and podcasts, that provides RSS feeds for almost every portion of its website.
    XSL for creating human-readable OPML & RSS feeds is an interesting quirk I’ve seen a few times in the wild with interesting results and design opportunities.
    Of course you can’t get away with writing an article without referencing http://isrssdead.com/. The favicon on the site, which ironically doesn’t have an RSS feed, leads me to believe that it’s owned by Dave Winer, the creator of RSS. It seems like it is giving a nod to http://isabevigodadead.com/, but given the site owner, I don’t think it will ever indicate “yes”.
    One of my favorite RSS tangential topics is OPML and OPML subscription. There’s nothing more fun that auto-updating subscriptions of bundled RSS feeds.
    An interesting, underreported, and discussed phenomena I’ve noticed over the last few years for many websites that do have RSS is that they’ll change CMSes and redirect all their URLs properly for SEO purposes, but they completely neglect to redirect their RSS/Atom/other feeds and thereby lose all their subscribers or force them to manually fix broken feeds. It’s the sad equivalent of creating a new Twitter account and then trying to regain all of one’s followers one at a time–and a simple thing to fix.
    Not sure how much interest it is overall, but I’ve got an RSS feed of RSS related tags on my site which has at least a few interesting tidbits, as well as off-label and non-standard use cases.
    I’m watching your RSS feed for your take.

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67. Who else still has a “blogroll” on their website?
    Bonus points if you’ve got an OPML file.

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68. Who else still has a “blogroll” on their website?
    Bonus points if you’ve got an OPML file.

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69. That’s a blast from the past!
    
    
    

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70. Keeping my follows on my site as an OPML file allows me to use Inoreader for OPML subscribe. Then I can use their built-in search (and saved searches) to get information from personal websites I’m following.

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71. I spent some time tonight looking at Substack as a platform. It’s impressive just how many people I follow on Twitter use it as yet-another-platform to be on. I wonder how much duplication of content they’re generating? How I wish that everyone could simply have one canonical place to follow them.
    One thing I find myself wanting is a discovery-based follow button for Microsub that would allow me to input either my own following list or even my Twitter account which would then parse through my Twitter follows to allow me to quickly follow the personal websites that appear in people’s Twitter website and bio fields. 

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72. follow is a common feature (and often UI button) in silo UIs (like Twitter) that adds updates from that profile (typically a person) to the stream shown in an integrated reader, and sometimes creates a follow post either in the follower’s stream (“… followed …” or “… is following …”) thus visible to their followers, and/or in the notifications of the user being followed (“… followed you”).

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73. Mine does. I also keep a list of people who have IndieWeb sites and most (though not all) will support Webmentions: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/
    Most under the IndieWeb and some under the IndieWeb for Education and Blogger headings will support webmentions.
    You can find others by browsing through Brid.gy users, the vast majority of whom will support it as will users of Micro.blog. Another good source of discovery is the IndieWeb webring: https://🕸💍.ws.
    If you’d like, you can add a Webmention button to your site to visually indicate that you support it.
    Update: Also, if you want to meet some “in person”, I’d welcome you to join one of our virtual meetups coming up: https://events.indieweb.org/

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74. A blogroll is a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend.

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75. Webmention is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web, a powerful building block that is used for a growing federated network of comments, likes, reposts, and other rich interactions across the decentralized social web.

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76. I just discovered “This Is Altadena” a podcast by the Altadena Library District. Adding it to my list of local Pasadena, South Pasadena, and Altadena area news sources.
    To my knowledge this is the only local area podcast I’ve come across.

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77. Discord. Ha!
    What we really need is a planet of posts tagged with RSS that has its own RSS feed! I’ll start by offering my feed about RSS: https://boffosocko.com/tag/RSS/feed/
    Or maybe if you’re daring, we need a shareable OPML file of feeds? Send me your feed about RSS, and I’ll add it to my list.
    But seriously what is really new in RSS land?
    RSS 2.0 will celebrate it’s 12th birthday at the end of the month on March 30th. It hasn’t changed or evolved since that time.
    While many say it’s dead, it’s still thriving all around the web as a serious form of glue that’s supported by almost every major platform out there.
    People are still adding these sidefiles to their sites all these years later. In fact, I just read a colleague’s article about moving from ATOM to RSS the other day. And it wasn’t that long ago that the Knight First Amendment Institute fixed their RSS feed.
    But who is still iterating on doing new and interesting things with RSS?
    One of the more interesting things I’ve seen is Julien Genestoux‘s work with SubToMe, which iterates significantly on making RSS easier to use and subscribe to sites.
    There’s also Dave Winer‘s work with OPML and FeedBase which are intriguing.
    Last year I saw some ideas out of Matt Webb who also made https://aboutfeeds.com/.
    Ryan Barrett has some great RSS translation tools in Granary.
    I’m using RSS and OPML to power a blogroll on steroids.
    What are your favorite RSS tools and experiments?

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78. Michael Beckwith, this is genius. Long live blogrolls!
    But let’s be honest, they’re a sort of discovery method that is also built into other social platforms: Twitter lists,Twitter follow lists, Facebook lists, etc. Most now have AI using these lists to suggest who you ought to follow next. When will WordPress get that plugin?
    My issue is that in a bigger social space, we need full pages for these sorts of data rather than the small sidebar widgets of yore.
    This was the last serious conversation I remember seeing about the old Link Manager:

    @photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions. https://t.co/Lt6cpWwkuj
    — Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018

    So… should I “update” the link manager? On one hand, it has a 2-year warning. On the other, do we want it to show prominently in search?
    — Andrew Nacin (@nacin) July 17, 2018

    So who besides Michael has a blogroll now? Mine’s at https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Where’s yours?!

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79. Chris Aldrich’s (very long) blogroll. I like the idea of offering an OPML version of it.

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80. Great

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81. Who else at #I⁠Anno21 has a practice of public annotation using Hypothes.is? Or perhaps on your own website, or other platform? Please share your usernames, URLs, and feeds so we can all have a richer group of examples.
    For example, you can find me at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, much of which is mirrored on my personal website in various ways as bookmarks, read posts, notes, and even a custom annotation post. Here are a few others I follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds
    Many annotation tools have scant social features, but there are ways to follow others’ work.
     

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82. What local individual or local community blogs should I be following in the Pasadena, Glendale, Altadena areas in SoCal?

    https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Local%20News

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83. I read quite a bit of material online. I save “bookmarks” of all of it on my personal website, sometimes with some additional notes and sometimes even with more explicit annotations. One of the things I feel like I’m missing from my browser, browser extensions, and/or social feed reader is a social layer overlay that could indicate that people in my social network(s) have read or interacted directly with that page (presuming they make that data openly available.)
    One of the things I’d love to see pop up out of the discovery explorations of the IndieWeb or some of the social readers in the space is the ability to uncover some of this social reading information. Toward this end I thought I’d collect some user interface examples of things that border on this sort of data to make the brainstorming and building of such functionality easier in the near future.
    If I’m missing useful examples or you’d like to add additional thoughts, please feel free to comment below.
    Examples of social reading user interface for discovery
    Google
    I don’t often search for reading material directly, but Google has a related bit of UI indicating that I’ve visited a website before. I sort of wish it had the ability to surface the fact that I’ve previously read or bookmarked an article or provided data about people in my social network who’ve done similarly within the browser interface for a particular article (without the search.) If a browser could use data from my personal website in the background to indicate that I’ve interacted with it before (and provide those links, notes, etc.), that would be awesome!
    Screen capture for Google search of Kevin Marks with a highlight indicating that I’ve visited his page several times in the past. Given the March 2017 date, it’s obvious that the screen shot is from a browser and account I don’t use often.
    I’ll note here that because of the way I bookmark or post reads on my own website, my site often ranks reasonably well for those things.
    On a search for an article by Aaron Parecki, my own post indicating that I’ve read it in the past ranks second right under the original.
    In some cases, others who are posting about those things (reading, commenting, bookmarking, liking, etc.) in my social network also show up in these sorts of searches. How cool would it be to have a social reader that could display this sort of social data based on people it knows I’m following? 
    A search for a great article by Matthias Ott shows that both I and several of my friends (indicated by red arrows superimposed on the search query) have read, bookmarked, or commented on it too.
    Hypothes.is
    Hypothes.is is a great open source highlighting, annotation, and bookmarking tool with a browser extension that shows an indicator of how many annotations  appear on the page. In my experience, higher numbers often indicate some interesting and engaging material. I do wish that it had a follower/following model that could indicate my social sphere has annotated a page. I also wouldn’t mind if their extension “bug” in the browser bar had another indicator in the other corner to indicate that I had previously annotated a page!
    Screen capture of Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think in The Atlantic with a Hypothes.is browser extension bug indicating that there are 329 annotations on the page.
    Reading.am
    It doesn’t do it until after-the-fact, but Reading.am has a pop up overlay through its browser extension. It adds me to the list of people who’ve read an article, but it also indicates others in the network and those I’m following who have also read it (sometimes along with annotations about their thoughts).
    What I wouldn’t give to see that pop up in the corner before I’ve read it!
    Reading.am’s social layer creates a yellow colored pop up list in the upper right of the browser indicating who else has read the article as well as showing some of their notes on it. Unfortunately it doesn’t pop up until after you’ve marked the item as read.
    Nuzzel
    Nuzzel is one of my favorite tools. I input my Twitter account as well as some custom lists and it surfaces articles that people in my Twitter network have been tweeting about. As a result, it’s one of the best discovery tools out there for solid longer form content. Rarely do I read content coming out of Nuzzel and feel robbed. Because of how it works, it’s automatically showing those people in my network and some of what they’ve thought about it. I love this contextualization.

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84. #FeedReaderFriday Wonder what I’m reading? Here’s my own following list:
    https://boffosocko.com/about/following/
    A central list I control with associated RSS feeds & OPML files makes it portable for use in various kinds of feed/social readers.

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85. A group of people have been posting with the tag #FeedReaderFriday with some people and resources for just this sort of effort. 
    Given limited instance search, this link may be better: https://mastodon.social/tags/FeedReaderFriday
    I’ve also recently run across: https://bringback.blog/
    If you’re repopulating a feed reader, I’ve got a long list in which folks may find some interesting tidbits hiding: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Potentially easier if your reader supports OPML.

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86. @chrisaldrich Ooh, thanks. This is great!
    

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87. This Article was mentioned on maya.land

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88. This Article was mentioned on bgibola88.com

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89. @kiko @dys_morphia I borrowed lots of ideas from https://indieweb.org/blogroll
    
    
    blogroll – IndieWeb

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90. @chrisaldrich @dys_morphia Borrowing ideas drives IT forward and you are part of the list
    
    

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