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21 thoughts on “Subscribe”

1. For several years, I’ve hosted my personal blog at http://chrisaldrich.wordpress.com. This week I’ve moved everything over to a new address at http://boffosocko.com.
   Those who have previously been subscribed by email will continue to receive email notifications of new posts as before.  WordPress.com followers will only see new posts in the Reader. You will not receive email updates unless you subscribe to receive those on the new site.  Some older subscribers may have missed one or two recent posts in the transition this week, so feel free to take a moment to catch up.
   Others subscribed via RSS may potentially need to update their RSS feeds to reflect the change.
   I’ve set up 301 page redirects so that those visiting old URL pages should automatically be redirected to the appropriate pages, but some may need to use the search box functionality to find the article or notes they were looking for.
   If you have any issues/problems in this transition that you can’t seem to remedy directly, please email me directly; I’m happy to help.
   Thanks for reading!
    

2. This Article was mentioned on boffosocko.com

3. As part of my evolving IndieWeb experience of owning all of my own internet-based social data, last year I wanted a “quick and dirty” method for owning and displaying all of my Twitter activity before embarking on a more comprehensive method of owning all of my past tweets in a much more comprehensive way. I expected even a quick method to be far harder than the ten minute operation it turned out to be.
   Back in early October, I had also replied to a great post by Jay Rosen when he redesigned his own blog PressThink. I saw a brief response from him on Twitter at the time, but didn’t get a notification from him about his slightly longer reply, which I just saw over the weekend:

   I don’t like the way tweets displayed on a blog look. I am fussy about that. Would I like to have a searchable archive in my possession so I don’t lose it all when Twitter goes under? I would.

   Jay Rosen, journalism professor NYU,
   in reply to my comment on PressThink’s new design and third space
    
   So, for his benefit as well as others who are interested in the ability to do something like this quickly and easily, I thought I’d write up a short outline of what I’d originally done so that  without spending all the time I did, others can do the same or something similar depending on their needs.
   If part of Mr. Rosen’s reply doesn’t give you enough motivation for why one would want to do this, IndieWeb.org has a laundry list of motivations along with a list of dead and defunct sites and social media silos that have taken pedabytes of data with them when they died.
   How to (Quickly) Own and Display Your Tweets on Your Own Site
   Download all your tweets

   Go to: https://twitter.com/settings/account

   Near the bottom of the page you should see a “Your Twitter archive” section
   See the Request your archive button? Click it.
   After a (hopefully) short wait, a link to your archive should show up in your email associated with the account. Download it.
   Congratulations, you now own all of your tweets to date!
   You can open the index.html file in the downloaded folder to view all of your tweets locally on your own computer with your browser.

   Click the button to request your Twitter archive be emailed to your account email address.
   Display your Twitter archive
   The best part is now that you’ve got all your tweets downloaded, you can almost immediately serve them from your own server without any real modification.
   Simply create an (accessible–use the same permissions as other equivalent files) folder named twitter on your server and upload all the files from your download into it. You’re done. It’s really that simple!
   In my case I created a subfolder within my WordPress installation, named it “twitter”, and uploaded the files. Once this is done, you should be able to go to the URL http://example.com/twitter and view them.
   The twitter folder in my WordPress directory with all of the downloaded files.
   As an example and to see what my archive looks like, visit http://boffosocko.com/twitter.
   Alternately one could set up a subdomain (eg. http://twitter.example.com) and serve them from there as well. You can change the URL by changing the name of the folder. As an alternate example, Kevin Marks uses the following: http://www.kevinmarks.com/tweets/.
   When you’re done, don’t forget to set up a link from your website (perhaps in the main menu?) so that others can benefit from your public archive. Mine is tucked in under the “Blog” heading in my main menu.
   The user interface of your Twitter archive.
   Caveats
   Unfortunately, while you’ve now got a great little archive with some reasonable UI and even some very powerful search capabilities, most of the links on the archive direct back to the originals on Twitter and don’t provide direct permalinks within the archive. It’s also a static archive, so you’ve periodically got to re-download and upload to keep your archive current.  I currently only update mine on a quarterly basis, at least until I build a more comprehensive set up.
   Current Set Up
   At the moment, I’m directly owning all of my Twitter activity on my social stream site, which is powered by Known, using the POSSE philosophy (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). There I compose and publish all of my Tweets and re-Tweets (and even some likes) directly and then I syndicate them to Twitter in real-time. I’ve also built and documented a workflow for more quickly tweeting using my cell phone in combination with either the Twitter mobile app or their mobile site.  (Longer posts here on BoffoSocko are also automatically syndicated (originally with JetPack and currently with Social Network Auto-Poster, which provides a lot more customization) to Twitter, so I also own all of that content directly too.)
   You’ll notice that on both sites, when content has been syndicated, there’s a section at the bottom of the original posts that indicates to which services the content was syndicated along with permalinks to those posts. I’m using David Shanske’s excellent Syndication Links plugin to do this.
   The syndication block that follows posts on my site so one can easily/quickly see alternate versions in other social silos.
   Ultimately, I’d like to polish the workflow a bit and post all of my shorter Twitter-like status updates from BoffoSocko.com, but I still have some work to do to better differentiate content so that my shorter form content doesn’t muddy up or distract from the people who prefer to follow my longer-form content. Based on his comment, I also suspect that this is the same semantic issue/problem that Jay Rosen has. I’d also like to provide separate feeds/subscription options so that people can more easily consume as much or as little content from my site as they’d like.
   Next steps
   For those who are interested in more comprehensive solutions for owning and displaying their Tweets, I’ve looked into a few WordPress-based possibilities and like the following two which could also be potentially modified for custom display:

   DsgnWrks Twitter Importer

   Ozh’ Tweet Archiver (Separately available on GitHub with scripts [.csv, JSON] for importing more than 3200 Tweets limit imposed by Twitter API; it also has a custom “Twitter” theme available; for additional support and instructions there are additional blogposts available. [1] [2]

   Both of these not only allow you to own and display your tweets, but they also automatically import new Tweets using the current API. Keep in mind that they use the PESOS philosophy (Post Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site) which is less robust than POSSE, mentioned above.
   I’ll note that a tremendous number of WordPress-based plugins within the plugin repository that are Twitter related predate some of the major changes in Twitter’s API in the last year or two and thus no longer work and are no longer supported, so keep this in mind if you attempt to explore other solutions.
   Those with more coding ability or wokring on other CMS platforms may appreciate a larger collection of thought and notes on the Twitter wiki page created by the IndieWeb Community. [3]
   Thoughts?
   Do you own your own Tweets (either before or after-the-fact)? How did you do it? Feel free to tell others about your methods in the comments, or better yet, write them on your own site and send this post a webmention (see details below).
   The IndieWeb movement is coding, collecting, and disseminating UI, UX, methods, and opensource code to help all netizens to better control their online identities, communicate, and connect themselves to others at IndieWeb.org. We warmly invite you to join us.

   References

   [1]
   O. Richard, “ Ozh’ Tweet Archiver (Backup Twitter With WordPress) « planetOzh,” Planet Ozh, 21-Sep-2010. [Online]. Available: http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/ozh-tweet-archiver-backup-twitter-with-wordpress/. [Accessed: 05-Dec-2016]

   [2]
   J. Reifman, “Import and Archive Your Tweets With WordPress,” Envato Tuts+, 28-Jan-2015. [Online]. Available: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/import-and-archive-your-tweets-with-wordpress–cms-22656. [Accessed: 05-Dec-2016]

   [3]
   “Twitter,” IndieWeb.org. [Online]. Available: http://indieweb.org/twitter. [Accessed: 05-Dec-2016]

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4. This Article was mentioned in How to Own & Display Your Twitter Archive on Your Website in Under 10 Minutes | boffosocko.com

5. The IndieWeb movement is all about having a place on the Web that you own and control. As Chris Aldrich put it in his excellent introduction to the IndieWeb, “wouldn’t it be better if you had a single website that represented you online?” From the point of view of content creation, there’s no question that posting on your own website is the best way to control your content. But what about consuming content? There are still unresolved issues with that, which I’ll explore in this post.
   Content consumption is an issue due to the sheer volume of content now pouring out of blogs, particularly those in the IndieWeb community. Much of it is content that doesn’t necessarily have value to anyone but the person posting it. I’m thinking of things like check-ins, RSVPs and bookmarks. Do I really want to know that you’ve checked into a cafe, followed by another post thirty minutes later announcing you’re at the gym? Not really.
   There are a couple of ways this type of content can be filtered.
   Feed reader filters
   Firstly you, the reader, could do it yourself through a feed reader like Inoreader. The pro version of Inoreader allows you to filter text, with a feature called “Rules.” You can choose to either display posts that include a certain word, or exclude all posts with that word. There isn’t a direct way to filter out entire classes of content, like check-ins. However you could manage it by filtering out words like “check-in,” “Foursquare,” and so on. Overall, you can get fairly granular with Inoreader’s rules, including with regular expressions.

   As an example, say I only want to see articles in RollingStone.com about the band Weezer. If so, I’d create the following rule:

   That test seemed to work well (and yes, the Vic Mensa article did include a reference to Weezer):

   There are some restrictions on how much filtering you’re allowed to do with Inoreader:

   “Rule will be applied to a maximum of 1000 most recent articles from the past month. Any external actions (e.g. emails, notifications, sending to services like Pocket) will be limited to 10 occurrences per service.”

   But these limits seem reasonable. In terms of cost, you’re allowed 30 rules with the US$29.99/year subscription, and unlimited rules for US$49.99/year. Free users get no rules, but again that’s fair. Content filtering is a feature worth paying for.
   The other feed reader I use, Feedly, has only just introduced content filtering into its Pro version. “Mute Filters” allow you to “fine-tune your feeds by hiding mentions of unwanted topics or keywords.”

   I immediately made use of this new feature by filtering out any mention of the current US President.
   Mute Feeds is a nice addition to Feedly Pro and has a slick design. But it’s clearly not as powerful as Inoreader’s filtering. For example, there’s no easy way to filter out everything except for Weezer in RollingStone.com. Also you are only allowed up to 25 Mute Filters with a Feedly Pro subscription, which costs US$45 per year. So you don’t get as much bang for your buck on Feedly.
   Filtering at the source
   The second way to better control your content consumption is mostly dependent on the source: subscribing to pre-filtered RSS feeds. Once again, Chris Aldrich is showing the way. He offers a number of topic-specific RSS feeds, for example one with just his math-related posts. For IndieWeb bloggers wanting to emulate this, Chris wrote a post with details.

   Conclusion
   Offering topic-specific feeds is a great idea and, personally, I’d like to see the IndieWeb community focus a bit more on that. I’m all for owning all your content, but that doesn’t mean all of it is suitable for public consumption.
   That said, it makes the most sense for users to control content filtering directly. Which means it’s ultimately up to feed readers to provide that service. Both Inoreader and Feedly allow filtering, although Inoreader currently has the most powerful one of the two. Of course there may be other feed readers that offer content filtering as well.
   Let us know your thoughts on information overload in blogging and how to filter it.

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6. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

7. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

8. This Article was mentioned on wiobyrne.com

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9. I’ve been doing a bit of clean up in my feed reader(s)–cleaning out dead feeds, fixing broken ones, etc. I thought I’d take a quick peek at some of the feeds I’m pushing out as well. I remember doing some serious updates on the feeds my site advertises three years ago this week, but it’s been a while since I’ve revisited it. While every post kind/type, category, and tag on my site has a feed (often found by simply adding /feed/ to the end of those URLs), I’ve made a few custom feeds for aggregated content.
   However, knowing that some feeds are broadly available from my site isn’t always either obvious or the same as being able to use them easily–one might think of it as a(n) (technical) accessibility problem. I thought I’d make a few tweaks to smooth out that user interface and hopefully provide a better user experience–especially since I’m publishing everything from my website first rather than in 30 different places online (which is a whole other UI problem for those wishing to follow me and my content). Since most pages on my site have a “Follow Me” button (courtesy of SubToMe), I just needed to have a list of generally useful feeds to provide it. While SubToMe has some instructions for suggesting lists of feeds, I’ve never gotten it to work the way I expected (or feed readers didn’t respect it, I’m not sure which?) But since most feed readers have feed discovery built in as a feature, I thought I’d leverage that aspect. Thus I threw into the <head> of my website a dozen or so links from some of the most typical feeds people may be most interested in from my site. Now you can click on the follow button, choose your favorite feed reader, and then your reader should provide you with a large list of feeds which you might want to subscribe. These now broadly include the full feed, a comments feed, feeds for all the individual kinds (bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, listens, etc.) but potentially more useful: a “microblog feed” of all my status-related updates and a “linkblog feed” for all my link-related updates (generally favorites, likes, reads, and bookmarks).
   Some of these sub-feeds may be useful in some feed readers which don’t yet have the ability for you to choose within the reader what you’d like to see. I suspect that in the future social readers will allow you to subscribe to my primary firehose or comments feeds, which are putting out about 85 and 125 posts a week right now, and you’ll be able to subscribe to those, but then within their interface be able to choose individual types by means of filters to more quickly see what I’ve been bookmarking, reading, listening to or watching. Then if you want to curl up with some longer reads, filter by articles; or if you just want some quick hits, filter by notes. And of course naturally you’ll be able to do this sort of filtering across your network too. I also suspect some of them will build in velocity filters and friend-proximity filters so that you’ll be able to see material from people who don’t post as often highlighted or to see people’s content based on your personal rankings or categories (math friends, knitting circle, family, reading group, IndieWeb community, book club, etc.). I’ve recently been enjoying Kicks Condor’s FraidyCat reader which touches on some of this work though it’s not what most people would consider a full-featured feed reader but might think of as a filter/reader dashboard sort of product.
   Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll write a bit of code so that each individual page on my site that you visit will provide feeds in the header for all the particular categories, tags, and post kinds that appear on that page?That might make a clever, and simple little plugin, though honestly that’s the sort of code I would expect CMSes like WordPress to provide out of the box. Of course, perhaps broader adoption of microformats and clever readers will obviate the need for all these bits?
    

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10. Bill, I’m not sure I follow your question. What problem are you trying to solve?
    If take a stab and read it as “how could one subscribe to a subset of content from a WordPress website”, then it helps to know that the core functionality of WordPress automatically includes feeds for all the taxonomies (and a variety of combinations) on a site. This means that all your tags, categories, Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have those) all have individual feeds. Thus if you wanted to separate your “featured” longer reads from your status updates, checkins, likes, or other post types, you could add a specific category or tag to those posts and they’d have a feed you could provide people with to subscribe. If you added “featured” as the tag, then the feed from your site would be:
    https://billbennett.co.nz/tag/featured/feed/
    Since you’re using post kinds, you already have an “article” feed at: 
    https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/article/
    All of your top level menu items look like they have feeds associated with them, for example:
    https://billbennett.co.nz/telecommunications/feed/
    Post Kinds will also allow you to create aggregate feeds based on type so you could provide a linkblog feed of things you’ve liked, favorited, read, and bookmarked (if all of these are enabled on your site) with a link like:
    https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/like,favorite,read,bookmark/feed/
    It’s a bizarre hodgepodge of both Post Kinds and a category, but you can also specify exotic things like https://boffosocko.com/?kind=note&cat=945 which are things on my sites which are notes and categorized as reads. Simply throw in feed (to the right spot) for https://boffosocko.com/feed/?kind=note&cat=945/ et voilà! Something like this could allow you to tag/categorize your notes, likes, etc. and still not “spam” readers with them because they might be subscribed to your content with the taxonomies of “article” and “telecommunications”, for example.
    Some additional illustrative examples include the fact that for most/all of the post kind links on my own homepage one could add /feed/ to the end of those URLs and get a subscribeable feed out of them. I also have some examples on my Subscribe page.
    I’ve written a bit about some of this at “Cleaning up feeds, easier social following, and feed readers“, which also includes some links to prior work which may be helpful.
    Here’s some additional detail from the WordPress Codex that may be helpful as well: https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/#finding-your-feed-url

11. 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?

12. This is awesome Cherie! I love having the ability to pick and choose exactly what content I get from people’s websites like this. Few know that it’s even a possibility.
    I did some explorations a while back because a few people complained when I went from posting to my site a few times a month to posting sometimes 20-60 times a day for every tiny little thing. 
    Aside: I just looked and my site is putting out almost 10,000 posts a year, so maybe I need something more severe sounding than firehose? :O
    You may have run across it in some of your research, but I’ve written a few tidbits that might help you refine some bits as you tinker. I’ll look forward to seeing what else your site does that mine can copy as well.
    One thing I’ve been wanting to do as well is to provide some SubToMe buttons to help make it easier for people to subscribe to feeds from my site on my subscribe page. Perhaps that’s better than the page of crazy code people get when they click on RSS feed pages, especially if they don’t know what to do with those links?
    One day I’d love to create a dashboard of all the feeds my site offers as checkboxes or something to let people create their own custom feeds using and/or/not operators using WordPress’ built in feed URLs, but it seems like an awfully big project.
    Since you’re on micro.blog as well, I’ll mention that the concatenation of feeds using the Post Kinds plugins also allows me more direct control of what I pipe into micro.blog. I’m currently using the following feed in my account settings to post to m.b.:
    https://boffosocko.com/kind/article,note,photo,read,watch,listen,bookmark,favorite/feed/
    For your reply tests, feel free to use this post as a test ground if you like. For sites that support Webmention, you should be able to reply to my post directly from the webmention/comment in the comments section of your original post. But you could also try to create a completely new post that is a reply to this one as well. Both should work.
    If you use Twitter along with Brid.gy I’ve also found an interesting “secret” there for creating nested threading: 
    https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

13. I’d done some previous work to help improve the newsletter that my website sends out. I’ve iterated a bit on that process today.
    Hopefully the changes are a well-balanced solution for both my readers and me. One that allows readers to get what they’d like what they’d like and when, and for me to be able to own the relevant data and relationships rather than selling it off or heavily farming it out to one of the newsletter silos like Substack. Hopefully it also cuts down on the manual portions of the problem that I’ve had in the past.
    Part of my concern is that, depending on the day, I can be posting just a few items to my website while other days will see 50 or more posts. (It’s amazing how many posts you have when you try to own everything that you post publicly to the web.) Naturally not everyone may be interested in all of my content, and people will have different preferences on how often they receive updates.
    New options
    To kick off some new options, I’ve updated the email sign up process to allow people to choose some broad categories of content and types they may be interested in receiving. Most of these categories only have a smaller handful of updates within a month, so those indicating some of the specific categories as a preference will only receive them on a monthly basis.
    If you’re subscribing to everything, the status updates, the link blog, or portions of the social stream those will be delivered in a weekly newsletter, so readers will get as much as possible without missing out on anything.
    I’m starting to collect the preference data for the future, but I’ve also got a beta section of the sign up form to specify the frequency with which you’d like to receive updates. (Note: this isn’t fully functional yet as there are some plumbing issues to handle.)
    Folks who are subscribed should start seeing the changes propagate to their subscriptions within the next month.
    Caveats and Potential Issues
    I’ve been receiving less interaction from those who had previously subscribed to my old WordPress.com website over a decade ago, so I’m leaving those subscribers behind (you should receive an email about this separately). If you find you’re in that old group, just sign up and select the content categories or types you’d like to receive from the new system.
    I’m sure there will be some initial bumps and bruises in the transition, so bear with me and don’t hesitate to send your feedback in a way that makes you most comfortable. I’m sure some of my custom posts may not work as well with the newsletter, and hopefully I’ll get those sorted out shortly too.
    If you’d like to change your preferences at any time, know that there’s a link at the bottom of the newsletter for changing them. If you would prefer some other custom newsletter with specific categories, content types, or frequency, feel free to email me, and I can set you up with something that most closely meets your specific needs.
    Eventually I hope there will be a more streamlined system that will allow people to choose categories, post kinds, and frequency options (daily, weekly, monthly) to suit their specific needs.
    Other Subscription Methods
    I’m still providing a number of different ways (RSS, email, etc.) of helping people to subscribe to what they’d like to receive, so take a look at all of those if you have other needs. If you have questions or need some custom help for receiving exactly what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to reach out.
    As always, thanks for reading!

    To sign up/subscribe, visit our subscription page.

    Syndicated copies:

14. I’d done some previous work to help improve the newsletter that my website sends out. I’ve iterated a bit on that process today.
    Hopefully the changes are a well-balanced solution for both my readers and me. One that allows readers to get what they’d like what they’d like and when, and for me to be able to own the relevant data and relationships rather than selling it off or heavily farming it out to one of the newsletter silos like Substack. Hopefully it also cuts down on the manual portions of the problem that I’ve had in the past.
    Part of my concern is that, depending on the day, I can be posting just a few items to my website while other days will see 50 or more posts. (It’s amazing how many posts you have when you try to own everything that you post publicly to the web.) Naturally not everyone may be interested in all of my content, and people will have different preferences on how often they receive updates.
    New options
    To kick off some new options, I’ve updated the email sign up process to allow people to choose some broad categories of content and types they may be interested in receiving. Most of these categories only have a smaller handful of updates within a month, so those indicating some of the specific categories as a preference will only receive them on a monthly basis.
    If you’re subscribing to everything, the status updates, the link blog, or portions of the social stream those will be delivered in a weekly newsletter, so readers will get as much as possible without missing out on anything.
    I’m starting to collect the preference data for the future, but I’ve also got a beta section of the sign up form to specify the frequency with which you’d like to receive updates. (Note: this isn’t fully functional yet as there are some plumbing issues to handle.)
    Folks who are subscribed should start seeing the changes propagate to their subscriptions within the next month.
    Caveats and Potential Issues
    I’ve been receiving less interaction from those who had previously subscribed to my old WordPress.com website over a decade ago, so I’m leaving those subscribers behind (you should receive an email about this separately). If you find you’re in that old group, just sign up and select the content categories or types you’d like to receive from the new system.
    I’m sure there will be some initial bumps and bruises in the transition, so bear with me and don’t hesitate to send your feedback in a way that makes you most comfortable. I’m sure some of my custom posts may not work as well with the newsletter, and hopefully I’ll get those sorted out shortly too.
    If you’d like to change your preferences at any time, know that there’s a link at the bottom of the newsletter for changing them. If you would prefer some other custom newsletter with specific categories, content types, or frequency, feel free to email me, and I can set you up with something that most closely meets your specific needs.
    Eventually I hope there will be a more streamlined system that will allow people to choose categories, post kinds, and frequency options (daily, weekly, monthly) to suit their specific needs.
    Other Subscription Methods
    I’m still providing a number of different ways (RSS, email, etc.) of helping people to subscribe to what they’d like to receive, so take a look at all of those if you have other needs. If you have questions or need some custom help for receiving exactly what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to reach out.
    As always, thanks for reading!

    To sign up/subscribe, visit our subscription page.

    Syndicated copies:

15. Newsletter work for my website continues apace. I’ve now got a (beta) option to sign up for daily updates of all posts. To try this option change your settings to “all topics”, “entire stream”, and “daily”.

16. This Article was mentioned on meanderthal.executivewp.com

17. Thank you Wouter for the read. I accept your criticism of my practice. To explain my personal intent, I used to use Diigo to capture such links. However, I turned to using my own sites as I wanted to own the data. I am not worried about whether it is ‘blogging’ or a ‘weblog’, my focus is on collecting the dots to develop longer form reflections upon. I felt awkward when I clicked on Dave Cormier’s site and found it was full of my pingbacks. My site therefore acts as something of a canonical link in-lieu of the actual link.
    In regards to following the firehose, I have discussed was of adjusting the feed before. However, I am yet to set up a page like Chris Aldrich. From your points, I guess I should.
    I did think that maybe my monthly newsletter sufficed, obvious not.
    As a side note to all this, I also wondered about what it might mean to capture absolutely everything to form a deeper appreciate my presence on the web, but I long gave up that hope. I read way more than I respond to.

18. This Article was mentioned on jacky.wtf

19. Cory Doctorow addresses the changing times in regards to challenges with being able to be able follow a particular part of someone’s interests or output.

    If you loved a writer’s output of x but couldn’t abide their output of y, no problem — you’d just suck their feed into your reader and tell it to block stuff tagged as y.
    That dream is mostly dead. Even on the Fediverse, your ability to follow someone for x but not y is crude as hell, hardly better than the web of the early 2000s.
    Cory Doctorow https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772

    Personally, what I find interesting about Doctorow’s discussion is whether you find a writer or are just interested in a topic. Although I am really intrigued by Chris Aldrich’s model, where you can easily put together a custom feed of the bits you you like. I fear that this sort of model still puts too my onus on the writer, not the reader. I also feel that maybe there is something of a reality of going crate digging. Maybe, feed readers will continue to evolve and become ‘smart’, but for now I will live with the practice of serendipitously sifting and sorting through feeds for the dots.

20. A semi-regular reminder that all my posts are on my website where you can follow or subscribe in a number of ways (including as a Mastodon instance!).
    You can also find me on micro.blog if you move there. It’s a spectacular, healthy platform and community that would appreciate your contribution and presence. I recommend it highly.
    If you need help finding an “exit”, I’m both happy and well-equipped to not only suggest but to provide direct technical help. Reach out in any way that feels most comfortable to you.

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21. A semi-regular reminder that all my posts are on my website where you can follow or subscribe in a number of ways (including as a Mastodon instance!).
    You can also find me on micro.blog if you move there. It’s a spectacular, healthy platform and community that would appreciate your contribution and presence. I recommend it highly.
    If you need help finding an “exit”, I’m both happy and well-equipped to not only suggest but to provide direct technical help. Reach out in any way that feels most comfortable to you.

    Syndicated copies:

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