Matt Haughey (A Whole Lotta Nothing)Here’s my exported Newsblur RSS feed list. It’s mostly everything I was following until the day Google Reader died. Of these couple hundred feeds, only a couple dozen are regularly upda…
Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)Inspired by Matt Haughey’s public posting of the RSS Feeds he subscribes to, I’m doing the same (below).
What is RSS, you ask? A method to subscribe to what your favorite websites publish and have their updates all in a single place. Think of it as DVR for the Internet, food delivery instead of pickup except for the web. Podcasts would on the same technology and concept: Subscribe once, receive forever without asking again.
Lately though, its been making a bit of a comeback. Idea being that self-selecting your daily information diet (see: No Trump-loving-creepy-brothers-in-laws) probably means less unwilling toxicity and restless nights of non-sleep. ❧
–highlighted December 08, 2019 at 04:26PM
This is the third time I’ve heard about RSS coming back in almost as many days, and this not long after highlighting some recent advancements in feed readers. (One of the others was Jeremy Keith at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in San Francisco.) Kevin highlights a fantastic reason why using a feed reader can be important and more healthy than relying on the social aggregation algorithms in your not-so-friendly-neighborhood social media platforms.
Like Kevin and Matt, I think it’s a nice thing to share one’s sources and feeds. A while back I created a following page where I share a huge list of the people and sources I’m following regularly via RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, JSONFeed, and even h-feed. Everytime I follow or unfollow a source, the page auto-updates. I also provide OPML files (at the bottom of that page) so you can import them into your own feed reader. If you’re using a feed reader like Inoreader that supports OPML subscription, you can input the OPML file location and your copy of my feeds will automatically update when I make changes.
Happy reading!
Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)Kevin Smokler's library of RSS Feeds, posted publicly for you.
The only way to beat social media algorithms is to get your audience off social media. Put your work on your own site. Retrain them to follow via RSS.
I typically post all of my replies on my own website anyway, but I’ve discovered that the comment functionality on your blog isn’t working.
The only way to beat social media algorithms is to get your audience off social media. Put your work on your own site. Retrain them to follow via RSS.
Warren Ellis (WARREN ELLIS LTD)People keep asking me where I find stuff, or where to start with an RSS reader. I exported my subscruptions, and damn, there are a LOT of dead blogs out there. Here is a selection of blogs from the list of ones I think are still active. Like I say, it’s just a bit of my active subscriptions list, but maybe you’ll find something you want to follow.
hat tip: Kicks Condor, who coincidentally highlighted this list in his most recent HREFHUNT post (2019-11-11). Kudos to Kicks for also being included in the list itself!
This website lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for websites that do not support RSS themselves, by using the respective website's API and then translating that data to RSS feeds.
I have to be better about posting my movie “reviews” more quickly. I get overwhelmed thinking that I need to write something about the movie when really the whole point of me doing these reviews is just to record what movies I’ve seen. So this month, I’m writing very little about each of these viewings.
I always had this problem too and finding quick and easy ways of posting them before I forgot became part of the solution. I’m not sure I’ve fully documented what I’ve been doing, but it’s slowly changed over time, so I thought I’d take a moment to write down some of the faster methods I use or have used.
One can always use the WordPress mobile posting app, bookmarklets in conjunction with Post Kinds, or even posting via email, but it usually takes a few minutes and can distract from conversations and family/friends when they’re around. Generally I’m looking to immediately capture the title of the film/tv show, the date/time stamp, and maybe the location. Later on, when I’ve got a few extra minutes, I’ll come back and optionally add details/context like poster art, cast, crew, etc. and a mini review with a rating. The method you use will depend on what kind of display you want and how much detail you’d like. At the end of the day, do what works best for you.
I’m a relatively avid user of the Swarm app (fka Foursquare), so I’ll often take a photo of the movie poster, ticket, theater/other while I’m at the theater and then quickly checkin on my phone. Swarm typically has some interface to indicate which movie I’m seeing when I check into movie theaters. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to manually type things in while I’m waiting for the show to start. Once the movie is over I can discretely can go back to the checkin and add a few quick comments and a rating without disturbing the rest of the party, otherwise I’ll revisit it later.
To get this all on my website I’ve set up the Micropub plugin and configured OwnYourSwarm (for public/private posting–you choose), and the service takes care of posting all the data for me as a checkin so that I don’t forget. In the end it’s usually less than 10 seconds, and I’ve got the data I need as it happens.
This alternate PESOS method can be done using popular services like IMDb.com or Letterboxd.com and relies on using RSS feeds from them to pipe content to my site using IFTTT.com. (Other silo services may be able to do this as well.) Most often I send the URLs of movies/tv shows of what I watch from IMDb to my Reading.am account which has an RSS feed to trigger IFTTT.com that, in turn, creates a draft post on my website. (If only IMDB.com had a usable RSS feed, I could skip the Reading.am account. Typically I’ll search for the movie on IMDb, share that from my browser to may email client and email it to a custom Reading.am email address that autoposts it to my Reading.am account.) Later I can peek in on it, add a mini-review and rating if I like, and publish publicly or not. Letterboxd can be used similarly, but it has the added benefit of having a rating system built in so it can send that data as well.
Hopefully they’ll resolve with a logged in account, so here are the two IFTTT.com recipes I’m using as reference:
(If you can’t access the recipes to recreate your own, let me know, and I’ll manually delineate all the relevant settings.)
Both methods will work without it, but I’m also using the Post Kinds plugin to create explicit watch posts which have a nice contextual presentation which I kind of like. It also has the ability to parse URLs to create the context quickly, so if you put in an IMDb or Letterboxd URL, it will fetch artwork, cast, description, etc. automatically and there’s no need to cut/paste.
To get some idea, here are some interesting examples of these methods.
If others have better/faster methods, I’d love to hear them or see them documented. Perhaps one day someone (or maybe even IMDb or Letterboxd) will build a custom Micropub client specifically for watch posts (something akin to Teacup for food/drink or Indiebookclub for reading) that will automatically poll the data related to a film/television title and post it to one’s site?
https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=abcxyz as a feed into my feed reader where abcxyz is the username of the person I’d like to follow.
So to subscribe to my Hypothes.is feed you’d add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich to your reader.
Of course, the catch then is to find/discover interesting people to follow this way. Besides some of the usual interesting subjects like Jon Udell, Jeremy Dean, Remi Kalir, et al. Who else should I be following?
Ideally by following interesting readers, you’ll find not only good things to read for yourself, but you’ll also have a good idea which are the best parts as well as what your friends think of those parts. The fact that someone is bothering to highlight or annotate something is a very strong indicator that they’ve got some skin in the game and the article is likely worth reading.
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.
Futilely attempting to build an RSS reader that’s not at all an RSS reader.
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.
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.
Jason McIntosh (Fogknife)Kicks Condor and Giles Turnbull are doing a couple interesting things with RSS this month.
Jeffrey Zeldman, Nothing Fails Like Success:
On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?
I think so. I hope so. My part is to write a free RSS reader — and make it open source so that other people can easily use RSS in their apps.
RSS isn’t the only part of the solution, but writing an RSS reader is in my wheelhouse. So this is what I choose.
Do I claim it’s as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter (for instance)? I do not. But it’s the step forward that I know how to take.
My point is: don’t give in to despair. Take a step, even if it’s not the step that will solve everything. Maybe your step is just to start a blog or open a Micro.blog account. Whatever it is — do it! :) #LetsFixThis
Luminary is a podcast streaming platform that gives you access to 500k+ shows, when and where you want. Sign up today and be the first to try @luminary!