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

Read New York Times staffers revolt over publication of Tom Cotton op-ed (CNN)
Staffers at The New York Times expressed dismay Wednesday over the newspaper's decision to publish an op-ed written by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that called for the U.S. military to be deployed in cities across the country to help restore order.

Forget about blackout poetry, Google enables highlight poetry in your browser!

Kevin Marks literally and figuratively highlighted a bit of interesting found poetry on Google’s Ten things we know to be true article. (Click the link to see the highlight poetry on Google’s page for yourself.)

A screenshot appears below:

Screenshot of a Google Page with the words "Doing evil is a business. take advantage of all our users" disaggregated, but highlighted so as to reveal a message.
Found poetry:
“Doing evil
is a business
take advantage of
all our users”

Here’s a shortened URL for it that you can share with others: bit.ly/D-ntB-Evil

It’s a creative inverse of blackout poetry where instead of blacking out extraneous words, one can just highlight them instead. This comes courtesy of some new browser based functionality that Google announced earlier this week relating to some of their search and page snippets functionality.

You can find some code and descriptions for how to accomplish this in the WISC Scroll to Text Github repository.

What kind of poetry will you find online this week?

RSVPed Attending WordPress Custom Post Types and Taxonomies with Marco Berrocal
Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 11:00 AM
OVERVIEW: There are times when a WordPress installation may come up short in relation to what is required by your client. You need content of another type that isn’t a page or a post, and you need to label it differently. Enter Custom Post Types and Taxonomies.
During this Meetup, Marco will discuss what they are, show you how to create them, what his recommendations are when it comes to creating them, and how you can see WordPress as more than just a blogging or a simple site platform.
RSVPed Attending VIRTUAL MEETUP: Speed Networking with Alec Miller & Christy Conner
Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 8:30 AM
This structured networking event will allow you to meet new professional and personal contacts and establish a basis for future collaboration in an exciting format. You will be randomly placed in small groups and each person will have a few minutes to give an overview of their background, their goals, and areas that they might be looking for new connections or ways they can help others.
If you are new to the format of speed networking don’t worry – we’ll have suggestions as to how to start, what to talk about, and how to follow up afterwards.
Read Google now highlights search results directly on webpages (The Verge)
It doesn’t seem to be available everywhere just yet.

SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature. ❧

And of course there will be crazy implications for the adtech space.

Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:30AM

Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question. ❧

This is a feature that’s been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.

Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.

I’m curious how these different implementations differ?

Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:36AM

and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year ❧

According to Kevin Marks, this is the GitHub Repo they’ve been using for creating this work: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#:~:text=the%20worst&text=a%20Google&text=serious%20breakage&text=behavior
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 12:08PM

Watched "I Love Lucy" The Business Manager from CBS
Directed by William Asher. With Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, William Frawley. After Lucy gets several months behind in all the bills, Ricky hires a no-nonsense business manager who puts her on a strict budget. Lucy comes up with a scheme to get some extra money that soon has her rolling in cash.
Episode included a reference to Diamond Jim Brady who I’d never heard of. Interesting that he had died in the late teens and was well enough to earn a mention in this episode.
Replied to a thread by Katherine Moss and geonz (Twitter)
These could be good reasons to join a Homebrew Website Club meeting coming up. Help, support, and brainstorming conversation within a group to make it easier? Everyone’s welcome!