Replied to a post by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
Testing out adding email reply links to my RSS feed using the All In One SEO plugin documentation at: https://semperplugins.com/documentation/rss-content-settings.
It’s not exactly what I want yet because it doesn’t have an easy way to include the title of the post or the permalink to provide context, but it at least includes an email address.
Replied to a thread by Ian Guest, Aaron Davis, and John Johnston (Twitter)
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.

Ten: A not-so “Hypothetical” Example

I use all the data I capture online using Hypothes.is to port my annotations, highlights, and notes I make online into my commonplace book.

#HeyPresstoConf20


More details and a video example:

Hypothes.is annotations to WordPress via RSS 

Read Introducing aboutfeeds.com, a Getting Started guide for web feeds and RSS by Matt WebbMatt Webb (interconnected.org)

Introducing About Feeds

aboutfeeds.com is a single page website, for linking wherever you keep your web feed.

I’m still a fan of Julien Genestoux‘s SubToMe.com for related functionality and ease of use with RSS. If only more people used it or it was built into browsers.

I think it’d also be cool if this sort of simple UI were also easier to use with some of the newer IndieWeb social readers that are making it easier to follow websites and interact with them.

Read Introducing aboutfeeds.com, a Getting Started guide for web feeds and RSS by Matt Webb (interconnected.org)

There’s a better way to read websites and it’s called web feeds a.k.a RSS. But web feeds are hard to get into for new users, so I decided to do something about it.

I posted about suggested improvements to RSS the other day and top of my list was onboarding: If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it. I’d like to see a website … which explains RSS, feeds, and readers for a general audience.

So because it’s no-one’s job, and in the spirit of do-ocracy:

I built that website.

Or to slightly abuse a phrase, Be the change that you wish to see in the world wide web.

Read How would I improve RSS? Three ideas by Matt Webb (interconnected.org)
My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.
Matt has got a good overview and some useful ideas and I like the direction he’s moving. There has been more work on not only RSS but other feeds and specs like Microsub in the past few years. The IndieWeb has moved the needle a bit on this topic as well as related work on things like OPML. Even then, we still have a way to go on making the UI as easy as social media sites do.
Read Joining RSS Club as an Experiment by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
A few days ago Frank Meeuwsen wrote a posting only available through his RSS feed, not otherwise easily visible on his blog. His RSS only postings do still have URLs of course and can be directly accessed that way. But they do not show up on the front page, in search, or as part of archive overviews...

Syndicating my IndieWeb Wiki edits to my personal website

I don’t have a specific “Edit” post kind on my website (yet!), but I’ve set things up–using a prior recipe–so that edits I make to the IndieWeb wiki are syndicated (via PESOS) to the Micropub endpoint on my website to create draft posts on my personal website!

Presently they were easiest to map to my website as bookmarks until I can create the UI to indicate edits, but changing the UI piece, and retroactively modifying some data for posts, should be fairly simple and straightforward for me.

I’m not sure I’ll keep the entire diff content in the future, but may just keep the direct text added depending on the edit and the potential context. We’ll play around and see what comes of it. It’s reasonably sure that I may not post everything publicly either, but keep it as either a draft or private post on my website. In some cases, I may just add the edit syndication link on an original bookmark, read, watch, or other post type, a pattern which I’ve done in the past for articles I’ve read/bookmarked in the past and simply syndicated manually to the wiki.

I’ll also need to tinker with how to save edits I make directly in the chat channels via Loqi, though I think that is straightforward as well, now that the “easy” part has been done.

I only wish I had thought to do this before I made the thousands of edits to the wiki earlier this week. Both IndieWebCamp West 2020 and the edits for part of organizing that were the inspiration for finally getting around to doing this.

This isn’t as slick as the process Angelo Gladding recently did a demo of and is doing to syndicate his edits to the wiki from his website using a POSSE syndication workflow, but I’ll guarantee my method was way less work!

Also, since my edits to the wiki are made as CC0 contributions, the POSSE/PESOS flow doesn’t make as much difference to me as it might on other social silos.

I don’t edit Wikipedia incredibly often, but perhaps I set that functionality up shortly too.

Here’s the first example (public) post: https://boffosocko.com/2020/06/30/55772818/

I’ll get around to fixing the remainder of the presentation and UI shortly, but it’s not a horrific first pass. It’s at least allowing me to own copies of the data I’m putting out on the Internet.