It's just a site that lists all of the blogs that cover the wonderful iOS development community. It was built, and is maintained by Dave Verwer who is also the author of iOS Dev Weekly.
It’s far from finished (particularly from the data perspective), but it’s starting to shape up and look like something. I’m currently publishing an Indieweb blogroll on my front page. (Don’t presume anything if you’re not on it yet, I’ve a long way to go.) I’m still contemplating how to break it up into more manageable/consumable chunks primarily for myself, but also for others like Richard who were looking for ways to subscribe to others in this particular community.
For those who have readers that allow them to either subscribe to OPML files and/or import them, here’s my open OPML file. It’s a full firehose of everything, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to divide it into chunks more easily. I’d recommend subscribing to it if you can as it’s sure to see some reasonable changes in the coming weeks/months.
As a result of owning all this data, my blog/site has become MUCH more active than it had been before. (It’s also been interesting to see just how much data I’d been giving to social media sites.) This extra activity has caused a few to tip me off that they’re seeing a lot of email notifications and additional material in their RSS feeds that they’re not used to seeing (and may not necessarily care about). So rather than risk them unsubscribing from everything and allow them to receive what they’re used to seeing, I’ve spent some time in the last couple of days to work on my IndieWeb Commitment 2017 which was to:
Fix my site’s subscription/mail functionality so that I can better control what current subscribers get and allow for more options for future subscribers.
Because a lot of the recent additions to my site have been things like owning all my Instagram posts, my bookmarks, what I’m watching, updates about books I’m reading, and links to everything I’ve been reading online, I’ve been using a category on the site called “Social Stream” with each of these posts as sub-categories. In most cases, social stream could be synonymous with microblog to some extent though it covers a broader range of content than just simply Twitter-like status updates.
I added a filter in my functions.php file for the JetPack-based plugin that prevents my site from emailing those who have used the JetPack subscription service from receiving emails for each and every post in those categories.
I had previously been preventing some of these emails from firing on a manual basis, but with their increased frequency, it was becoming unsustainable.
For those interested, the code and some useful tips can be found at the JetPack site. A copy of the specific code I’m currently using in my functions.php file appears below:
add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories', 'exclude_these' );
function exclude_these( $categories ) {
$categories = array( 'social-stream');
return $categories;
}
For future subscribers, I wanted to allow some easier subscription options, particularly when it comes to RSS. Fortunately WordPress does a pretty good job of not only providing RSS feeds but makes them relatively configurable and customizeable with good documentation. [1] [2]
I wanted to create a few human-readable RSS feed names and feeds including:
With somewhat canonical feed URLs, I can always change where they point to in the future. To do this and have them map over into the actual feeds for these things, I did a bit of remapping in my .htaccess file based on some thoughts I’d run across recently. The code I used appears below:
# BEGIN rss
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ "/feed?cat=-484"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^microblog\.xml$ "/feed?cat=484"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^articles\.xml$ "/feed?kind=article"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^instagram\.xml$ "/feed?cat=936"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^linkblog\.xml$ "/feed?cat=964,945"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^read\.xml$ "/feed?cat=945"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^math\.xml$ "/feed?cat=10"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^informationtheory\.xml$ "/feed?cat=687"[L,R]
RewriteCond %{Query_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^feed$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]
</IfModule>
# END rss
Each of the cat=### are the numbers for the particular category numbers I’m mapping within WordPress for the associated category names.
I also spent a few minutes to figure out the RSS feed patterns to allow for the additional feeds provided by the Post Kinds plugin to work. While Post Kinds is similar to the native WordPress post formats, it’s designed particularly with IndieWeb posts in mind and uses a custom taxonomy which also wraps particular post kinds in the appropriate microformats automatically. The general form for these RSS feeds would be:
Other feeds could be constructed similarly by replacing “article” with the other kinds including: bookmark, favorite, jam, like, listen, note, photo, read, recipe, reply, repost, watch, and wish. I suspect that most will only want the articles while those who are really interested in the others can either “build” them themselves for subscribing, or given the sporadic nature of some, they would more likely be interested in the “social stream” feed noted above.
Finally there’s the most important question of what feed readers like Feedly or Woodwind can actually discover when someone searches for an RSS feed on my domain. It’s one thing to have customized feeds, but if feed readers can’t easily find them, the subscriber is never likely to see them or know they exist to want to consume them. Most advanced feed readers will parse the headers of my site for discover-able feeds and present them to the user for possible subscription.
Out of the box WordPress provides two RSS feeds as standard: one for posts (essentially everything) and one for comments. I added several additional ones (like those mentioned above), which I thought might be most requested/useful, into my page header to provide a slightly broader range of subscription options. I even included a few feeds for alternate sites I run, like my WithKnown-based site. I suppose if I wanted I could advertise feeds for my favorite sites anywhere.
To add these additional feeds, I added several additional lines into my page header similar to the following example which makes my posts categorized or tagged as mathematics discoverable:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Mathematics Feed" href="http://boffosocko.com/math.xml" />
Hopefully with these few simple changes, those who wish to subscribe to my blog by email won’t be inundated with a lot of the social details. Those who want all or even smaller portions of my feed can consume them more easily, and there’s a way to be able to consume almost anything you’d like by category, tag, or post format/post kind.
Now on to my stretch goal:
Finish my monthly email newsletter
Is there a particular type of content I’m creating here that you’d like to subscribe to? Let me know in the comments below if there’s a feed of a post format/kind, category, or tag you’d like to have that isn’t mentioned above.
But I suppose since I tweak something or other once every week or two anyway in small increments, it shouldn’t have to be too hard.
Since it’s been an itch for a while and because I’ve been slowly owning more and more of my web-centric activity here to the point that my longer article-length content is being swamped by smaller status updates and other smaller “digital exhaust” I would commit to:
I’d like to allow long time subscribers to keep receiving the longer form thought out content they’ve been getting without overwhelming them with the other material (status updates, photos, reading updates, etc.) which is potentially more interesting to only me or a much smaller subsection of my readers. I’ve been doing some of this manually for a while, but it’s time to fix it. For example, I’d like to allow people to subscribe only to longer-form articles or to status updates/notes, or to all of the above.
As a stretch goal, I’d started setting up a monthly email newsletter for even less frequent updates back in the summer, and it’s long overdue to not only finish it off, but to turn it on and ship one. Why? Because we all know that people love end of the year recap stories…