Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

👓 My Feedly wishlist | Paul Jacobson

Replied to My Feedly wishlist by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

Richard MacManus wrote about the state of feed readers as he saw it in his AltPlatform.org post titled “The state of feed readers”. He mentioned a couple things in his Feedly wishlist that prompted me to think more about what I’d like to see added to Feedly.

Feedly and custom sharing

Apparently there were a bunch of us thinking and writing about feed readers and the open web a year ago last June. Several week’s prior to Richard’s article, I’d written a piece for Richard’s now defunct AltPlatform entitled Feed reader revolution (now archived on my site), which laid out some pieces similar to Paul’s take here, though it tied in some more of what was then the state of the art in IndieWeb tech.

Around that time I began tinkering with other feed readers including Inoreader, which I’ve been using for it’s ability to auto-update my RSS feeds using OPML subscriptions from the OPML files I maintain on my own website. Currently I’m more interested in what the Microsub specification is starting to surface in the feed reader space.

I’m not sure if he’s played around with it since, but, like Paul, I was using some of the Press This bookmarklet functionality in conjunction with David Shanske’s Post Kinds plugin for WordPress to make posting snippets of things to my website easier.

Feedly has a Pro (aka paid) functionality to allow one to share content using custom URLs.

Screenshot of the custom share functionality set up from within Feedly.com.

While one can use the Share to WordPress URL functionality, I’d recommend the Custom Sharing feature. Using the Post Kinds plugin, one can use the following example URL to quickly share things from their Feedly account to their personal website:

https://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kindurl=URL&kind=bookmark

One should change the URL to reflect their own site, and one can also change the word “bookmark” to the appropriate desired kind including “like”, “favorite”, “read”, or any of the others they may have enabled within the Post Kinds plugin.

I personally don’t use this method as it only allows one custom sharing URL (and thus allows only one post kind), and instead (again) prefer Inoreader which allows one to configure custom sharing similarly to Feedly, but doesn’t limit the number of kinds and the feature is available in their free tier as well.

In addition to some of what I’ve written about the Post Kinds plugin before, I’ve also detailed how to dovetail it with sharing from my Android phone quickly in the past.

Highlights and Annotations

Also like Paul, I was greatly interested in quickly creating highlights and annotations on web content and posting them to my own website. Here I’m using a modified version of the Post Kinds plugin to accomplish this having created highlight posts and annotation posts for my site. Next I’m utilizing the ability to prepend http://via.hypothes.is to URLs on my mobile phone to call up the ability to use my Hypothesis account to easily and quickly create highlights and annotations. I then use some details from the outline linked below to capture that data via RSS using IFTTT.com.

Naturally, the process could be streamlined a lot from a UI perspective, but I think it provides some fairly nice results without a huge amount of work.

An Outline for Using Hypothesis for Owning your Annotations and Highlights

I will mention that I’ve seen bugs in trying to annotate easily on Chrome’s mobile application, but haven’t had any issues in using Firefox’s mobile browser.

👓 Another scenario for higher education’s future: the triumph of open | Bryan Alexander

Read Another scenario for higher education’s future: the triumph of open by Bryan Alexander (Bryan Alexander)

Let me offer another scenario for academia’s future. As is usual with the scenario forecasting methodology, this is based on extrapolating from several present-day trends – here, several trends around open.

In the past I’ve called this “The Fall of the Silos.” It’s a sign of our urban- and suburban-centric era that this rural metaphor doesn’t get a lot of traction. It’s also possible that contemporary American politics leads many to embrace silos. So I’ve renamed the scenario “The Triumph of Open.”

tl;dr version – In this future the open paradigm has succeeded in shaping the way we use and access most digital information, with powerful implications for higher education.

👓 Lego Wants to Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks (Without Anyone Noticing) | New York Times

Read Lego Wants to Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks (Without Anyone Noticing) (nytimes.com)

The Danish toymaker has relied on oil-based plastics for over 50 years. It wants to give them up by 2030. Finding alternatives is a vast project.

👓 The Narrow Passage of Gortahig | Dan Cohen

Read The Narrow Passage of Gortahig by Dan Cohen (Dan Cohen)

You don’t see it until you’re right there, and even then, you remain confused. Did you miss a turn in the road, or misread the map? You are now driving through someone’s yard, or maybe even their house. You slow to a stop.

On rural road R575, also known as the Ring of Beara and more recently rebranded as part of the Wild Atlantic Way, you are making your way along the northern coast of the Beara Peninsula in far southwestern Ireland. You are in the hamlet of Gortahig, between Eyeries, a multicolored strip of connected houses on the bay, and Allihies, where the copper mines once flourished. The road, like the landscape, is raw, and it is disconcertingly narrow, often too narrow for two cars to pass one another.

An interesting example of how small local decisions can have complex and interesting ramifications in the future.

👓 When the Social Silos Fall | Brad Enslen

Read When the Social Silos Fall by

Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)

I hear a lot of people wanting the social network silos (mainly Facebook and Twitter) to go away. I too want them to go. Eventually. But before they do, I want to examine some things in this little essay. Some Good Things that the Silos Did Searc...

👓 Hello world! | Michael Dunne

Replied to Hello world! by Michael Dunne (Michael Dunne)

I think it is traditional to start a new blog with a declaration of intent. The trouble is I have been here before, with many blogs and Web sites began with the best of intentions and then allowed to languish owing to lack of inspiration or deleted in frustration. So if I say that this blog may touch on many things but principally photography then you can take that with a large pinch of salt, but I hope this time it will be different.

Welcome to the indie web Michael!

What was that famous quote from the Zuzu in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life? “Every time a blog starts, an Angel gets its wings?” Yes, I’m sure that’s it!

There my be no better honor than to be mentioned on the first page of a new personal website, and I certainly am. I’m tickled to serve as an example, particularly when mentioned in the same breath as Dan Cohen.

I don’t aim to emulate them just yet (I’m not terribly technically minded), but I get the importance of owning my own data, and I like the idea of having my own little space on the Web.

You’re completely right Michael, don’t simply copy what anyone is doing, but focus on the bits and pieces you find the most valuable to you personally. Given your penchant, perhaps looking into the IndieWeb wiki pages for Flickr and Instagram might give you some inspiration? I’ll note that over time I’ve become much more technically proficient, but I suspect you’re not too far behind me, so don’t let anything stop you.

If you need any help or guidance as you travel along, feel free to reach out. There are many of us around to help.

You might also find a local group to work with as well. If you have the travel time available I know there’s an upcoming IndieWebCamp in Oxford that I suspect you’d have fun attending.

Good luck!

👓 Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking | Future Releases | Mozilla

Read Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking by Nick Nguyen (Future Releases | Mozilla)

Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

Feedly and custom sharing

Highlights and Annotations

What is smark?