Read Scripting News: Tuesday, June 4, 2019 by Dave Winer (Scripting News)
I've been working on the next River product. This time I'm using a MySQL database. Three tables -- feeds, items and subscriptions. The folder structure is exactly as in River5, except there is no data folder (the data is in the database). I am still a relative newbie in SQL databases, but I think this model works. I'm documenting as much as I can and of course I will release the Node.js source. I hope it serves as a basis for distributing RSS intelligence around the net. Last time around (Google Reader) we centralized. That was a mistake. If enough people run instances of this database we'll have a less interruptable base of functionality. I want to try out more new ideas as well. We've been really stuck for a long time.
Watched "The Newsroom" Amen from Netflix
Directed by Daniel Minahan. With Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher Jr., Alison Pill. On the week of 2011's Valentine's Day, the news team is forced to hire a local Egyptian stringer to report on Arab Spring developments and find they have placed him in great danger.
Watched most of the episode last night. Finished it today at lunch.
Read A Humanities Commons Twitter Conference – 18 July 2019 (conference.hcommons.org)
For the first ever Humanities Commons Twitter conference, we not only want to give our users a space to showcase what they’ve built, but we also want to further explore how Humanities Commons fits within larger conversations of open access scholarship, inclusivity, and scholarly communications.
I’ve put this on my calendar.
Replied to #oext355 #oextend The June Daily Challenge Survival Pack | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

What are you packing in your Daily Extend Challenge survival pack? Phone/Laptop? First aid kit? Kool-aid?  Share a photo or description of your suggested addition. The more ideas for things to help us meet the challenge, the more of us will survive. Let’s do this together!

Photo by Ron Hansen on Unsplash

@ontarioextend I’m going to try to do it without opening Twitter. I’m packing:
1. My IndieWeb-enabled website from which all my replies will be composed and originate.
2. My feed reader tuned into the challenge feed and this Twitter #​​​​oextend feed.

#​​​​oext355 #​​​​​oextend

Watched Fraidycat (Prototype Vid) by Kicks CondorKicks Condor from Kicks Condor

Futilely attempting to build an RSS reader that’s not at all an RSS reader.

The year of the reader continues. This is wicked awesome. I want this reader!

There are some interesting UI pieces hiding in here. I love the way things are sortable by importance. I like the sparklines for posting frequency. The color differentiation to give an idea about recency of posts is cool.

And one of the best things is that it’s not really a reader. In true Kicks fashion, it’s all just links, which means that one goes to the original site to read the content. I mentioned just yesterday the fact that some of my “identity” is lost with the CSS and details of my site being stripped within sterile readers. This sort of reader decimates that.

Of course, the verso of that is a reader that could be CSS configurable so that every site looks as busy or crazy as mango zone does in the video. Naturally, many browsers support local CSS, so I suppose I could make the New York Times look like Kicks Condor’s site, but who has the time to do all that configuration?? (Maybe one day…) Maybe some readers will have their simple chrome, but pull in not only the content, but the CSS and visual goodness along with them? The best of both worlds?

Watched "The Newsroom" We Just Decided To from Netflix
Directed by Greg Mottola. With Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher Jr., Alison Pill. Will's professional idealism is put to the test with his new news team when they are first to cover the Deep Horizon platform oil spill.
I loved this show in 2012 when it aired. I knew there were problems in journalism at the time, but looking back this show was way more prescient than I could have ever guessed.
Read Black and white and RSS by Giles Turnbull (gilest.org)
Black and white and RSS is an RSS feed of black and white photographs, updating throughout June 2019. There is no associated website. You can only see the photos if you use an RSS feed reader and subscribe to the feed.
This is certainly a cool looking experiment Giles Turnbull is attempting. I’m almost half tempted to hide my actual website and just make my content available via RSS, h-feed, or JSON-feed.

Sometimes for as much time and effort as I put into making my site look the way I want it, I often worry that it’s all for naught as I suspect many of my readers are just reading it in a feed reader or interfaces like Pocket or Instapaper that are stripping away all my CSS and reformatting it in some vanilla way for simpler reading.

I remember reading about Instagrammers making their accounts private as a means of getting more people to subscribe to them for the fear of missing out on their content. Maybe stopping posts to your site, but simply maintaining a feed could be the IndieWeb equivalent of this?


Hat tip: Jason McIntosh.

Read How I’m using Evernote and IFTTT to collect and organize my digital marginalia by Kevin Eagan (Critical Margins | Medium)
This year, I’ve written about how digital marginalia — those notes, clippings, likes, and kindle book highlights — have re-shaped the way we read. In particular, I believe that we are entering a new era of reading, an era that has a social reading element similar to reading in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when commonplace books and note-sharing were standard. Recently, I came across an article in The Verge by Thomas Houston that covers this topic. Part of “The Verge at Work” series, Houston talks about the history of reading and note-taking, and delves into his personal 21st-century version of this:
I feel like I’ve read this before. There’s nothing brilliant in it that I haven’t bee doing with my own website for a while.