Tag: Fraidycat

Some recent work in the feed reader and discovery space

I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly for those who are interested in the topic, but may not have been following as closely:

  • Inoreader has been working on a beta product that will make following social feeds in Twitter, Micro.blog, the Fediverse, and even IndieWeb sites with h-entry easier and prettier.
  • Kicks Condor has been iterating and doing some interesting work on the FraidyCat reader over the past few weeks.
  • Malcolm Blaney has a fantastic little feed reader in his Unicyclic site (not to mention that he’s also got a cool looking IndieWeb as a Service site with i.haza.website that I desperately want to have time to try out).
  • The volume of different and interesting content going into IndieWeb.xyz as a discovery hub has been increasing lately.
  • I’ve been admiring the discovery/aggregation work of Terry Greene on his OpenLearnerPatchbook and OpenFacultyPatchbook sites within the education space.
  • CJ Eller and others have been contributing to Blogging Futures as an extended online conversation in the form of an aggregated blogchain.

And none of this even touches on the excellent continuing work on Microsub readers which continues to astound me. Even with all of this activity, I’m sure I’m missing some fun little gems, so please don’t hesitate to mention them.

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?