Reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by

This might seem a little weird, but I'm trying to get back into using an RSS reader as an alternative to just relying on Twitter, so if you have any "weblogs" or sites you think I should add please hit me with them here -- odd, personal, insightful etc.
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) January 13, 2018

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?

Replied to Un podcast bien fait by Stéphane Deschamps (nota-bene.org)

Quand c’est bien fait, il faut le dire aussi.

Pardon the English, parce que mon français est très mal.

You indicate at the bottom of the post (the rough English translation is mine)

Bonus : c’est bien plus facile pour moi d’ajouter un texte à wallabag (au hasard) que de stocker un fichier audio pour une « consommation » facile. L’audio me demande toute une mise en œuvre assez pénible, pas le texte.
Bonus: It is much easier for me to add text to wallabag (at random) than to store an audio file for easy “consumption”. The audio requires quite a painful implementation, but not so for the text.

If you’re a fan of Wallabag for bookmarking text for later, you might appreciate using Huffduffer.com for your audio. It has a simple bookmarklet that will pull audio files, text, and tags from webpages and save them to your account. Your account then has a variety of iTunes audio feeds that you can subscribe to in your podcatcher of choice so that you can listen to the audio at your convenience later. If your podcatcher supports it, you can play it back at speeds that suit you (vite, donc).

Replied to a tweet by

Bill Bennett (Twitter)

“@ChrisAldrich Hi Chris, have you found an easy way to send different types or kinds to separate RSS feeds from Wordpress?”

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

Replied to Do you keep a diary? Or a life log? by Matt Maldre (Spudart)

Do you keep a daily diary? I have a couple questions for you: Length: Do you keep it really short? Or do you write longer form? Medium: Where do you write it? In a physical notebook? Or maybe online in a blog? Maybe some sort of software, or Google Drive. The short diary in a …

I keep the sort of diary/commonplace book you’re talking about. Generally it lives in two places. The biggest portion lives on my website where I can generally quickly bookmark almost everything I read, listen to, watch, annotate, reply to, or deal with online in some fashion. Not all of my posts there are public, but they’re archived there privately for search.

My secondary backup is on OneNote (I’d used Evernote in the past and I find them roughly similar), where I’ll tend to keep some personal daily to do lists (not too dissimilar from a digital bullet journal) and other private things that are easier to keep there than on my own website.

I like that both OneNote and my website are available on almost all the platforms I regularly use, so they’re always accessible to me.