We definitely should add a color filter when we design the search feature for books #ux #uxdesign #uxresearch pic.twitter.com/SB6YKhtmsc
— Tania UXD (@tania_uxds) January 21, 2022
Sections Seven things Roam did rightPotentialsIs Roam just a fad, a shiny new tool?All the small thingsAnecdotesThe trifecta: getting things into, out of, and across heads Roam Research is a phenomenon that took the tools for thought space by storm. Let’s appreciate the seven things it did right a...
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:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" /><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/" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />sealioning is a term for intrusive attempts to engage someone with questions and requests for evidence for their claims; don’t do this, especially on the IndieWeb, and consider how you can design create UX to disincentivize/reduce incentives to do so.
/feed/ to the end of those URLs), I’ve made a few custom feeds for aggregated content.
However, knowing that some feeds are broadly available from my site isn’t always either obvious or the same as being able to use them easily–one might think of it as a(n) (technical) accessibility problem. I thought I’d make a few tweaks to smooth out that user interface and hopefully provide a better user experience–especially since I’m publishing everything from my website first rather than in 30 different places online (which is a whole other UI problem for those wishing to follow me and my content). Since most pages on my site have a “Follow Me” button (courtesy of SubToMe), I just needed to have a list of generally useful feeds to provide it. While SubToMe has some instructions for suggesting lists of feeds, I’ve never gotten it to work the way I expected (or feed readers didn’t respect it, I’m not sure which?) But since most feed readers have feed discovery built in as a feature, I thought I’d leverage that aspect. Thus I threw into the <head> of my website a dozen or so links from some of the most typical feeds people may be most interested in from my site. Now you can click on the follow button, choose your favorite feed reader, and then your reader should provide you with a large list of feeds which you might want to subscribe. These now broadly include the full feed, a comments feed, feeds for all the individual kinds (bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, listens, etc.) but potentially more useful: a “microblog feed” of all my status-related updates and a “linkblog feed” for all my link-related updates (generally favorites, likes, reads, and bookmarks).
Some of these sub-feeds may be useful in some feed readers which don’t yet have the ability for you to choose within the reader what you’d like to see. I suspect that in the future social readers will allow you to subscribe to my primary firehose or comments feeds, which are putting out about 85 and 125 posts a week right now, and you’ll be able to subscribe to those, but then within their interface be able to choose individual types by means of filters to more quickly see what I’ve been bookmarking, reading, listening to or watching. Then if you want to curl up with some longer reads, filter by articles; or if you just want some quick hits, filter by notes. And of course naturally you’ll be able to do this sort of filtering across your network too. I also suspect some of them will build in velocity filters and friend-proximity filters so that you’ll be able to see material from people who don’t post as often highlighted or to see people’s content based on your personal rankings or categories (math friends, knitting circle, family, reading group, IndieWeb community, book club, etc.). I’ve recently been enjoying Kicks Condor’s FraidyCat reader which touches on some of this work though it’s not what most people would consider a full-featured feed reader but might think of as a filter/reader dashboard sort of product.
Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll write a bit of code so that each individual page on my site that you visit will provide feeds in the header for all the particular categories, tags, and post kinds that appear on that page?That might make a clever, and simple little plugin, though honestly that’s the sort of code I would expect CMSes like WordPress to provide out of the box. Of course, perhaps broader adoption of microformats and clever readers will obviate the need for all these bits?
%finished in the master view for My Books >> Currently Reading (example URL).
This would let me sort the 30+ books in my currently reading list and figure out which ones I’m furthest through and could potentially finish quickest on my sprint for cleaning out my list for the end of the year.
You’ve got almost every other bit of sortable data in those lists, why not this one? I’ll take a simple numerical view, but if you want to throw in the progress bar, there’s lots of bonus points in your developer Christmas stocking.
Jemima Kiss from the GuardianKevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks
Jemima Kiss interviews Kevin about Open Social at FOWA. Thu 9 Oct 2008 15.50 EDT
Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks. Even the biggest networks have seen their audience bases grow exponentially in unexpected communities; this is partly because of the dynamics of relationships between people, who mostly want to connect - or feel most comfortable connecting to people like themselves.
Despite some derogatory write-ups of Google's Orkut social network in the US press - "it's not a proper social network and is full of Brazilian prostitutes" - it's a perfect example of a social networking site with a strong community in one language. A community tends to mould the site to its own culture, which makes it less appealing for other languages and cultures. Clearly those with a strong English-language audience have a big advantage, despite the cultural differences of the Anglo-speaking world.
I asked Marks to explain a bit more about trends in social networking and how Open Social is trying to both facilitate growth, and respond to change. Open Social doesn't have a three-year road map, but is constantly adjusting its templates around the mapping of social information.
People tend to be members of more than one network for a reason.
Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 09:00PM
Mx. Aria Stewart (Twitter)It just crystallized for me what I think has been mistaken about thinking of unwanted interaction on social networks as a "privacy" problem. It's not.
A privacy problem is things becoming known more widely than they should, subject to surveillance and contextless scrutiny.The onslaught of sexual harassment on platforms like early Twitter (and later twitter for people of notability), @KeybaseIO, every naive social network is an attack on the right to exist in public. It is the inverse of a privacy problem.But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life.It's so endemic, so entrenched, and so normal that women should have to retreat to protect ourselves that we think of this as part of femininity. A strong civic life is seen as unfeminine, forward. It poisons us politically, socially, and personally.It is, at its core, an attack on democracy as well.The only way to undo this is to reconceive of this, not as a privacy problem but as an attack on public life. There will be new problems with this but at least they will be new.There has been work done on this, but I've never seen it connected to civic life, and this connects with my thoughts and work on community. The unit that social networks must focus on cannot be the individual. We do not exist as individuals first but as members of our communitiesWhen a new user joins a social network, their connection must be to their peers, their existing social relationships. A new user can only be onboarded in the context of relationships already on the network.Early adopters form such a community, but extrapolating from the joining of those initial members to how to scale the network misses the critical transition: from no community to the first, not from the first users to the next.New communities can only be onboarded by connections from individuals that span communities. New communities must be onboarded collectively, or the network falls to the army of randos.The irony is that surveillance capitalism has the information to do this but not the will, because as objects of marketing, we are individuals, statistics and demographics, not communities. The reality lies in plain sight.There have been attempts at social networks, sadly none dense enough to succeed, but that treat people as part of a web, and that their peers can shield and protect them. The idea is solid.The other alternative is to stop trying to give people a solitary identity, a profile and onboarding to a flat network, but instead only provide them with community connections. Dreamwidth is this to a large degree, if too sparse for most people to connect.Our social networks must connect us, not to our "friends" but to our communities. The ones that succeed do this by intent or by accident.
Facebook has a narrow view of community, but for those it matches, it works. With major flaws, but it does.Twitter, its community of early adopters, its creepy onboarding by uploading your contacts and mining data to connect you works. If I were to join and follow a few people I know, it would rapidly suggest many more people in my queer and trans community. It works.And this is why Ello failed. This is why Diaspora failed. This is why Mastodon succeeded, if only by scraping by the bare minimum. This is why gnu social failed. This is why a random vbulletin forum can succeed. The ones that succeed connect a dense community.Note that gnu social and mastodon are the same protocol! But they are different social networks. The difference in their affordances and the community structures they encourage are vastly different, despite interoperating.I'd say I don't know how apparent this problem is to white men — the ones largely designing these networks — but I do know. I know because of the predictable failures we see.
Part of this, I think boils down to how invisible community is when you are the default user.At no time am I unaware that I am trans, that I am a woman, that the people I follow and who follow me are distinct from the background. I can spot my people in a crowd on the internet with precision, just like a KNN clustering can.Trans culture in particular is Extremely Online. We are exceptionally easy to onboard to a new platform. But the solution can scale if we focus on solving it. And by knowing who is in the community (likely) and who is not, we can understand what is and is not harassment.We don't need to even know what the communities are — Twitter does not — and yet it knows how we cluster, and that suffices.
If we stop thinking of this as a privacy problem — letting us hide from the connections that are our solution — we can enlarge public life.That exceptional article — — about how bots sow division shows us another facet of this problem and way of thinking. Conceiving of this as a privacy problem fundamentally reacts with division when solidarity is needed.We can only fight this with a new, loose solidarity and an awareness of community boundaries. We can build technology that makes space for us to be safe online by being present with those that support us, and react together, rather than as individuals and separating us for safetyThis thread has meandered a bit, but I'm dancing around something important. We fundamentally need to stop organizing online activity the way we do. Follow and be followed is not where it's at.
It's join, manage attention, build connection.Stop sorting things topically and trying to find connections in content.
Start looking for clusters of relationships between people.
The question should not be "what is this about?" but "who is this for?"
Kicks Condor from Kicks CondorFutilely attempting to build an RSS reader that’s not at all an RSS 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?
I thought it was a pretty slick use of HTML to create some really simple and broadly useful UI.
Then earlier today I noticed that Jeremy Keith has recently switched to using this on his personal site in the comments section to provide toggles for his various webmention types including shares, likes, bookmarks, etc. But this is where I’m noticing a quirky UI issue that isn’t as web friendly as it could be. Jeremy and others (including myself own my own site) will often provide ID tags so that one can give permalinks to the individual comments using fragments of the form:
https://adactio.com/journal/15050#comment70567 or
https://adactio.com/journal/15050#comment71896
But here’s where the UI problem lies. The first fragment URL only resolves to the page instead of the specific bookmark hiding behind a <details> tag whereas the second fragment URL resolves to the page and automatically scrolls down to a comment by DominoPivot. It does this in both Chrome and FireFox and I would presume operates similarly in other browsers.
I suspect that most users would expect/prefer that the fragment URL should automatically expand the <details> tag and scroll down the page to that ID or fragment as well.
Perhaps Jamie, Jeremy, Tantek, Kevin or others may have some trickery to make this happen? Otherwise, do we need to start digging into specs and browsers to get them to better support this sort of fragment related functionality? Perhaps it’s this section of the HTML spec, the URL of which has such a fragment and therefor scrolls down properly if you click on it? (Meta pun intended.)
While some don’t like feeds that aren’t ordered temporally, this seems like a useful compromise when looking at feeds with large numbers of different sources.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the way Tantek Çelik concatenates likes within his homepage.
Whether within a stream of posts on a personal site or within a feed reader, this UI pattern is very subtle, but incredibly useful.
When former Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the breakup of the platform, he was lauded by anti-corporate politicians and the press. Then came a series of hard questions: how exactly would breaking up Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, address free speech concerns? Or help stifle the spread of propaganda on the platform? And how would American regulations affect the majority of Facebook users, who live in the global south? According to Michael Lwin, an American-born antitrust lawyer living in Yangon, Myanmar, US regulators should tread lightly. He and Bob speak about how calls to break up Facebook could have wide ranging unintended consequences, especially outside of the US.
Manton Reece (micro.blog)New home page for Micro.blog manton.org
The free Chrome extension Simplify will give you the Gmail you want.
