RSS | Chris Aldrich

Today I exported all my YouTube subscriptions as an OPML file and imported them to my website’s following page (aka blogroll). I still have a bit of clean up to do to categorize and present them all the way I’d like, but I’ve got a huge start on it.

I’m hoping now that I’ve cut the cord, I’ll be able to use my various feed readers to watch and stream more video content.

It’s amazing how many inactive channels I was following.

Special thanks to Martijn van der Ven who had done some great research on YouTube Atom feeds and OPML and created documentation on the IndieWeb wiki YouTube page.

Replied to Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine by

Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.

Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.

In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.

Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.

Liked Exploring Feed Discovery and Markup by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

The issue of finding feeds to subscribe is a challenge that I have explored in my attempts to implement code in support of the Yarns Microsub Server. I want to publish feeds in a way that others can find them, not just users, but automated systems that present them to users. So, let’s start with t...

Great start on outlining the problem. I’ll need to come back to it again and look at some potential examples to form a better opinion. I’m curious what examples may be unearthed by some of your questions.

Extra Feeds Plugin for WordPress

David Shanske has built a simple new IndieWeb friendly plugin for WordPress.

For individual posts, the Extra Feeds plugin will add code into the <header> of one’s page to provide feed readers that have built-in discovery mechanisms the ability to find the additional feeds provided by WordPress for all the tags, categories, and other custom taxonomies that appear on any given page.

Without the plugin, WordPress core will generally only provide the main feed for your site and that of your comments feed. This is fine for sites that only post a few times a day or even per week. If you’re owning more of the content you post online on your own website as part of the IndieWeb or Domain of One’s Own movements, you’ll likely want more control for the benefit of your readers.

In reality WordPress provides feeds for every tag, category, or custom taxonomy that appears on your site, it just doesn’t advertise them to feed readers or other machines unless you add them manually or via custom code or a plugin. Having this as an option can be helpful when you’re publishing dozens of posts a day and your potential readers may only want a subsection of your posting output.

In my case I have a handful of taxonomies that post hundreds to thousands of items per year, so it’s more likely someone may want a subsection of my content rather than my firehose. In fact, I just ran across a statistician yesterday who was following just my math and information theory/biology related posts. With over 7,000 individual taxonomy entries on my site you’ve got a lot of choice, so happy hunting and reading!

This plugin also includes feeds for Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have that plugin installed), and the author feed for sites with one or more different authors.

This is useful in that now while you’re on any particular page and want to subscribe to something on that specific page, it will be much easier to find those feeds, which have always been there, but are just not easily uncovered by many feed reader work flows because they weren’t explicitly declared.

Some examples from a recent listen post on my site now let you more easily find and subscribe to:

my faux-cast:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" />
the feed of items tagged with Econ Extra Credit, which I’m using to track my progress in Marketplace’s virtual book club:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Econ Extra Credit Tag Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/tag/econ-extra-credit/feed/rss/" />
the feed for all posts by an author:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />

Read Feed readers/content aggregators by Dan MacKinlay (danmackinlay.name)

Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.

Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. ❧

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:28AM

Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world.
Remember? from when we though the internet would provide us timely, pertinent information from around the world?
How do we find internet information in a timely fashion?
I have been told to do this through Twitter or Facebook, but, seriously… no. Those are systems designed to waste time with stupid distractions in order to benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles. Stop that. ❧

Annotated on February 09, 2020 at 10:40AM

Logged an itch Taxonomy feed discovery per post

On individual posts I’d love to add the feeds for the categories/tags that appear on that page to the header so that following me from that URL would allow feed readers to discover those particular feeds.

Replied to a tweet by

Mathew Ingram (Twitter)

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?

Read Feeds for journalists (leibniz.me)

This year started with a small project I really like: Feeds for Journalists, by Dave Winer. The idea is that RSS is still a valid technology to get an effective and unbiased flow of news. As he puts it, after reading a tweet by Mathew Ingram: If you’re a journalist a...

Found this while sifting through some OPML files.