I doubled-down on RSS – Eric Bailey
In which Eric says:
Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.
I’ll take it.
Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.
In which Eric says:
Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.
I’ll take it.
Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.
Same:
Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has.
Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!
A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.
I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:
A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.
Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.
This is spot-on:
Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.
A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow.
(Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.)
I like reading RSS feeds. I’ve written before about how my feed reader feels different to my email client:
When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed—a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar—but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That’s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.
Giles put it far better when described what using RSS feeds feels like :
To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.
To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.
That’s why I feel somewhat conflicted about email newsletters. On the one hand, people are publishing some really interesting things in newsletters. On the hand, the delivery mechanism is email, which feels burdensome. Add tracking into the mix, and they can feel downright icky.
But never fear! My feed reader came to the rescue. Many newsletter providers also provide RSS feeds. NetNewsWire—my feed reader of choice—will try to find the RSS feed that corresponds to the newsletter. Hurrah!
I get to read newsletters without being tracked, which is nice for me. But I also think it would be nice to let the authors of those newsletters know that I’m reading. So here’s a list of some of the newsletters I’m currently subscribed to in my feed reader:
The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:
A newsletter for the terminally curious.
Sentiers by Patrick Tanguay:
A carefully curated selection of articles with thoughtful commentary on technology, society, culture, and potential futures.
Policy, ethics and applied rationality with an Irish slant.
How science shapes stories about the future and how stories about the future shape science.
Adjacent Possible by Steven Johnson:
Exploring where good ideas come from—and how to keep them from turning against us.
Faster, Please! by James Pethokoukis:
Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture.
undefended / undefeated by Sara Hendren:
Ideas at the heart of material culture—the everyday stuff in all our lives
Today in Tabs by Rusty Foster:
Your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletter.
Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:
What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:
- build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
- see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
- easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads
(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)
RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.
But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.
How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to respond to me, publish something linking to what I said. If I want to respond to you, I publish something linking to what you wrote. Old school. Good school. It’s high-effort, but I think the required effort is a positive thing for a social network. Forces you to think more.
- You’re the curator
- You decide what’s interesting
- You have more control over what you read and how
- It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web
- It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed
Spot on!
To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.
To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.
That’s what using RSS feeds feels like.
I’ve written before about how I don’t have notifications on my phone or computer. But that doesn’t stop computer programmes waving at me, trying to attract my attention.
If I have my email client open on my computer there’s a red circle with a number in it telling me how many unread emails I have. It’s the same with Slack. If Slack is running and somebody writes something to me, or @here, or @everyone, then a red circle blinks into existence.
There’s a category of programmes like this that want my attention—email, Slack, calendars. In each case, emptiness is the desired end goal. Seeing an inbox too full of emails or a calendar too full of appointments makes me feel queasy. In theory these programmes are acting on my behalf, working for me, making my life easier. And in many ways they do. They help me keep things organised. But they also need to me to take steps: read that email, go to that appointment, catch up with that Slack message. Sometimes it can feel like the tail is wagging the dog and I’m the one doing the bidding of these pieces of software.
My RSS reader should, in theory, fall into the same category. It shows me the number of unread items, just like email or Slack. But for some reason, it feels different. When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed—a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar—but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That’s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.
I’ve managed to wire my neurological pathways to put RSS in the books category instead of the productivity category. I’m very glad about that. I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email. Maybe that’s why I’m never entirely comfortable with newsletters—if there’s an option to subscribe by RSS instead of email, I’ll always take it.
I have two folders in my RSS reader: blogs and magazines. Reading blog posts feels like catching up with what my friends are up to (even if I don’t actually know the person). Reading magazine articles feels like spending a lazy Sunday catching up with some long-form journalism.
I should update this list of my subscriptions. It’s a bit out of date.
Matt made a nice website explaining RSS. And Nicky Case recently wrote about reviving RSS.
Oh, and if you want to have my words in your RSS reader, I have plenty of options for you.
Matt made this website to explain RSS to people who are as-ye unfamilar with it.
Matt has thoughts on RSS:
My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.
A little while back, Marcus Herrmann wrote about making RSS more visible again with a /feeds
page. Here’s his feeds page. Here’s Remy’s.
Seems like a good idea to me. I’ve made mine:
As well as linking to the usual RSS feeds (blog posts, links, notes), it’s also got an explanation of how you can subscribe to a customised RSS feed using tags.
Then, earlier today, I was chatting with Matt on Twitter and he asked:
btw do you share your blogroll anywhere?
So now I’ve added another URL:
adactio.com/feeds/subscriptions
That’s got a link to my OPML file, exported from my feed reader, and a list of the (current) RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to.
I like the idea of blogrolls making a comeback. And webrings.
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feeds
page?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
RSS: now more than ever!
You get to choose what you subscribe to in your feed reader, and the order in which the posts show up. You might prefer to read the oldest posts first, or the newest. You might group your feeds by topic or another priority. You are not subjected to the “algorithmic feed” of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, where they choose the order for you.
A little while back, I switched from using Chrome as my day-to-day browser to using Firefox. I could feel myself getting a bit too comfortable with one particular browser, and that’s not good. I reckon it’s good to shake things up a little every now and then. Besides, there really isn’t that much difference once you’ve transferred over bookmarks and cookies.
Unfortunately I’m being bitten by this little bug in Firefox. It causes some of my bookmarklets to fail on certain sites with strict Content Security Policies (and CSPs shouldn’t affect bookmarklets). I might have to switch back to Chrome because of this.
I use bookmarklets throughout the day. There’s the Huffduffer bookmarklet, of course, for whenever I come across a podcast episode or other piece of audio that I want to listen to later. But there’s also my own home-rolled bookmarklet for posting links to my site. It doesn’t do anything clever—it grabs the title and URL of the currently open page and pre-populates a form in a new window, leaving me to add a short description and some tags.
If you’re reading this, then you’re familiar with the “journal” section of adactio.com, but the “links” section is where I post the most. Here, for example, are all the links I posted yesterday. It varies from day to day, but there’s generally a handful.
Should you wish to keep track of everything I’m linking to, there’s a twitterbot you can follow called @adactioLinks. It uses a simple IFTTT recipe to poll my RSS feed of links and send out a tweet whenever there’s a new entry.
Or you can drink straight from the source and subscribe to the RSS feed itself, if you’re still rocking it old-school. But if RSS is your bag, then you might appreciate a way to filter those links…
All my links are tagged. Heavily. This is because all my links are “notes to future self”, and all my future self has to do is ask “what would past me have tagged that link with?” when I’m trying to find something I previously linked to. I end up using my site’s URLs as an interface:
At the front-end gatherings at Clearleft, I usually wrap up with a quick tour of whatever I’ve added that week to:
Well, each one of those tags also has a corresponding RSS feed:
adactio.com/links/tags/serviceworkers/rss
adactio.com/links/tags/sci-fi/rss
adactio.com/links/tags/frontend/rss
…and so on.
That means you can subscribe to just the links tagged with something you’re interested in. Here’s the full list of tags if you’re interested in seeing the inside of my head.
This also works for my journal entries. If you’re only interested in my blog posts about frontend development, you might want to subscribe to:
Here are all the tags from my journal.
You can even mix them up. For everything I’ve tagged with “typography”—whether it’s links, journal entries, or articles—the URL is:
The corresponding RSS feed is:
You get the idea. Basically, if something on my site is a list of items, chances are there’s a corresponding RSS feeds. Sometimes there might even be a JSON feed. Hack some URLs to see.
Meanwhile, I’ll be linking, linking, linking…
The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.
Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?
No matter where I go on the Internet, I feel like I am trapped in the “feed,” held down by algorithms that are like axes trying to make bespoke shirts out of silk. And no one illustrates it better than Facebook and Twitter, two more services that should know better, but they don’t. Fake news, unintelligent information and radically dumb statements are getting more attention than what matters. The likes, retweets, re-posts are nothing more than steroids for noise. Even when you are sarcastic in your retweets or re-shares, the system has the understanding of a one-year-old monkey baby: it is a vote on popularity.
I was idly thinking about the different ways I can post to adactio.com. I decided to count the ways.
This is the classic CMS approach. In my case the CMS is a crufty hand-rolled affair using PHP and MySQL that I wrote years ago. I log in to an admin interface and fill in a form, putting the text of my posts into a textarea
. In truth, I usually write in a desktop text editor first, and then paste that into the textarea
. That’s what I’m doing now—copying and pasting Markdown from the Typed app.
If I’m logged in, I get a stripped down posting interface in the notes section of my site.
This is how I post links. When I’m at a URL I want to bookmark, I hit the “Bookmark it” bookmarklet in my browser’s bookmarks bar. That pops open a version of the admin interface tailored specifically for links. I really, really like bookmarklets. The one big downside is that they don’t work on mobile.
This is something I knocked together at Indie Web Camp Brighton 2015 using the Twilio API. It’s handy for posting notes if I’m travelling somewhere and data is at a premium. But I don’t use it that often.
Thanks to Aaron’s OwnYourGram service—and the fact that my site has a micropub endpoint—I can post images from Instagram to my site. This used to happen instantaneously but Instagram changed their API rules for the worse. Between that and their shitty “algorithmic” timeline, I find myself using the service less and less. At this point I’m only on their for the doggos.
Like OwnYourGram, Aaron’s OwnYourSwarm allows me to post check-ins and photos from the Swarm app to my site. Again, micropub makes it all possible.
OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm are very similar and could probably be abstracted into a generic service for posting from third-party apps to micropub endpoints. I’d quite like to post my check-ins on Untappd to my site.
Thanks to rel="me"
and IndieAuth, I can log into other people’s posting interfaces using my own website as the log-in, and post to my micropub endpoint, like this. Quill is a good example of this. I don’t use it that much, but I really should—the editor interface is quite Medium-like in its design.
Anyway, those are the different ways I can update my website that I can think of right now.
In terms of output, I’ve got a few different ways of syndicating what I post here:
Just so you know, if you comment on one of my posts on Facebook, I probably won’t see it. But if you reply to a copy of one of posts on Twitter or Instagram, it will show up over here on adactio.com thanks to the magic of Brid.gy and webmention.