Aaron Parecki

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#rss

  • Stay Curious https://twitter.com/staycurio_us
    Upcoming shows feature topics like #oauth #indieweb and much more. Add our RSS ferd to your reader: https://beyondtellerrand.com/feed/stay-curious

    #rss #staycurious #btconf #onlinevent
    Portland, Oregon • 33°F
    #oauth #indieweb #rss #staycurious #btconf #onlinevent
    Wed, Jan 26, 2022 6:46am +00:00 (liked on Sat, Jan 29, 2022 5:35am -08:00)
  • inessential: Brian’s Stupid Feed Tricks (inessential.com)
    #rss #atom #web #feed #indieweb
    Thu, Apr 15, 2021 4:05pm -07:00
  • Jeremy Keith https://adactio.com/

    The Return of the 90s Web | Max Böck

    June 19th, 2020

    Everything old is new again (thank goodness!):

    • Serverside Rendering
    • No-Code Tools
    • Personal Websites
    • Curated Feeds and Discovery
    • Smaller Communities and Web Monetization
    Portland, Oregon • 62°F
    #indieweb #trends #past #present #future #90s #serverside #rendering #blogs #blogging #personal #publishing #syndication #rss #curation #feeds #payments #community
    Fri, Jun 19, 2020 10:20am +00:00 (liked on Fri, Jun 19, 2020 7:44am -07:00)
  • Chris Aldrich https://boffosocko.com/
    The overall idea to make it easier to subscribe to a personal website is certainly a laudable one.

    Sadly the general concept presented here, while it sounds potentially useful, is far too little and misdirected. Hopefully better potential solutions are still not too late.

    First, let’s step back a moment. The bigger problem with feeds was that website designers and developers spent far too long in the format wars between RSS and Atom while the social media giants focused on cleaner and easier UI. This allowed the social silos to dramatically close the gap in functionality and usability. While website owners were spending time on formats and writing long articles about what RSS was, how it worked, and how to use it, the public lost interest. We need something really dramatic to regain this ground and /feeds just is not going to cut it.

    The first problem I see with this is that on it’s face /feeds both looks and sounds like code. No user really wants to interact with code if they don’t have to. Why not simply have a page or button called something much more user friendly like “subscribe” or “follow”? Almost every major social silo has a common pattern like this and has a simple “follow” button on every user’s page. A quick click and one is done with the transaction!

    Instead the solution offered here is to have not only yet-another-page but one that needs to be maintained. (As good as the /now idea may seem, the fact that it needs to be regularly and manually updated makes it a failure out of the gate. I’ll bet that less than half the /now pages out there have been updated in the last 6 months. I know mine hasn’t.) Worse, suppose I click over to a /feeds page, as an average person I’m still stuck with the additional burden of knowing or learning about what a feed reader is, why I’d need or want one, and then knowing what RSS is and how I might use that. I might see a one click option for Twitter or Mastodon, but then I’m a mile away from your website and unlikely to see you again in the noise of my Twitter feed which has many other lurking problems.

    One of the best solutions I’ve seen in the past few years is that posited by SubToMe.com which provides a single, customizable, and universal follow button. One click and it automatically finds the feeds hidden in the page’s code and presents me with one or more options for following it in a feed reader. Once I’ve chosen a reader, it remembers my choice and makes the following pattern easier in future transactions. This is a far superior option over /feeds because it takes away a huge amount of cognitive burden for the user. As a developer, I’ve got a browser bookmarklet that provides this functionality for sites that don’t provide it for me. How nice would it be if browsers went back and offered such a one button collection mechanism?

    Want to give this a try? I’ve got a “Follow Me” button in the side bar of my website. And if that doesn’t float your boat, I’ve tinkered with other methods of subscribing to my content that you can find at my subscribe page. Some developers might not be too scared of what’s on my subscribe page (a /feed page by a slightly friendlier name), but less technically minded people are sure to have a dramatically different perspective.

    The other piece here that I might take umbrage with is the offering to provide feeds to subscriptions to alternate services like Twitter and Mastodon. (This doesn’t take into any account that RSS feeds of social services are positively atrocious, not to mention that attempting to access Marcus’ Twitter feed in RSS Box returns the interminable error message: “There was a problem talking to Twitter. Please try again in a moment.”)

    Ideally I see a future in which every person has the ability to own both their own domain name and their content in a simple manner. If this happens and it’s easier to subscribe to the sites of my friends, then I don’t need corporate social media to intermediate the transactions on my behalf. I also don’t need them to intermediate what I’m actually seeing with their blackbox algorithmic feeds either. Friends, family, and colleagues could simply come to my website and subscribe to all or portions of my content in which they’re interested. While I still presently syndicate some of my content to silos like Twitter and Mastodon for the ease of friends or family who don’t know about the technical side of potential solutions, I post everything on my website first where one can subscribe in a feed reader or by email. Subscriptions in Twitter or Mastodon, while nice to have, are just a poor simulacrum of the real things being served by my site in better ways with more context and a design that better reflects what I’d like to portray online. A /feed page is going to be a failure from the start if you’re going to cede all the subsequent power directly to Twitter, Mastodon, and others anyway.

    While I like the volume of the reactions to the post (indicating that there’s not only a readership, but a desire for this sort of functionality), I’m disheartened that so many designers and developers think that the idea of /feeds is “enough” to stem the tide.

    For those who might be truly interested in designing our way out of this problem, I’d recommend looking at some of the design and development work of the IndieWeb community which is trying (slowly, but surely) to improve these sorts of technical hurdles. Their wiki has large number of examples of things that do and don’t work, discussion of where problems lie, and a community conversing about how to potentially make them better through actual examples of things that are currently working on peoples’ websites.

    A good example of this is the increasing improvement of social readers that allow one to subscribe to a variety of sources in a reader which also allows one to respond to posts in-line and then own that content on one’s website. If I can subscribe to almost anything out there in one interface and sort and filter it in any way I’d like, that’s far better than having twenty different feed readers named Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Soundcloud, etc. which I have to separately and independent manage and check. Now I’ve yet to see an IndieWeb reader with a one click SubToMe-type of solution for adding feeds to it, but I don’t think it will be very long before that’s a reality. The slowly improving Microsub spec that splits some of the heavy lifting needed to build and design a stand alone feed reader is certainly helping to make some massive headway on these issues.

    Maybe we’ll soon have an easy way for people to post who they’re following on their own websites, and their readers will be able to read or parse those pages and aggregate those followed posts directly into a nice reading interface? Maybe someone will figure out a way to redesign or re-imagine the old blogroll? Maybe we’ll leverage the idea of OPML subscriptions so that a personal blogroll (maybe we rename this something friendlier like a following page or personal recommendations, subscriptions, etc.) can feed a person’s subscriptions into their social reader? There are certainly a lot of solid ideas being experimented on and in actual use out there.

    We obviously still have a long way to go to make things better and more usable, not only for ourselves as designers and developers, but for the coding averse. I feel like there’s already a flourishing space out there doing this that’s miles ahead of solutions like /feeds. Why don’t we start at that point and then move forward?

    Portland, Oregon • 64°F
    #feedreaders #Microsub #OPML #OPMLsubscription #RSS #socialreaders #UI #webdesign
    Sun, May 31, 2020 5:26pm -07:00 (liked on Sun, May 31, 2020 5:32pm -07:00)
  • Matthias Ott https://twitter.com/m_ott
    My article about personal websites is on the front page of @newsycombinator atm and I was brave enough to read the comments. 🙈

    Guess what: People are adding links to their sites and #RSS feeds below! 🎉💪🤗 #takebackyourweb
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156868
    Portland, Oregon • 44°F
    #RSS #takebackyourweb
    Mon, Jan 27, 2020 3:27pm +00:00 (liked on Mon, Jan 27, 2020 8:23am -08:00)
  • PodPass: Proposal for an Open Protocol to Enable Direct Listener Relationships – RadioPublic (about.radiopublic.com)
    #podcast #rss #authentication #spec
    Mon, Aug 12, 2019 1:32pm -05:00
  • Cobalt :neurodiv: https://kitty.town/@Cobalt

    #IndieAuth is a pretty neat thing, and as I'm already a big #RSS user (have been since they were in general use, just never dropped them) I guess it'd be cool to have what amounts to a way to log into various sites that I don't feel called to make single accounts for and certainly don't feel like giving access to my Gmail or Facebook.

    Trouble is, I have very few places where I can put a ref="me" and a lot of the people I know don't either. Many sites don't let us edit the style sheet.

    Portland, Oregon • 28°F
    #rss #indieauth
    Mon, Mar 4, 2019 5:24am +00:00 (liked on Sun, Mar 3, 2019 10:37pm -08:00)
  • The Rise and Demise of RSS (twobithistory.org)
    #rss #web #history
    Wed, Jan 9, 2019 12:49pm -08:00
  • RSS is undead | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
    "It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem"
    #rss
    Mon, Apr 9, 2018 11:10am -07:00
  • RSS Invaders: A novel approach to managing information overload in syndicated feed readers | C i b o M a h t o . c o m (www.cibomahto.com)
    #rss #reader
    Tue, Feb 13, 2018 9:03am -08:00
  • syndication formats - anil dash - archives (web.archive.org)
    > for something as simple as syndication and distribution, HTML already has an overwhelming advantage over any nascent formats

    > It would make subscribing to a site easier, since one wouldn't have to find the URL of the RSS feed. The URL of the weblog itself would be what you wanted. How nice.
    #rss #indieweb #html
    Mon, Nov 20, 2017 3:00pm -08:00
  • Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media – AltPlatform (altplatform.org)
    #rss #reader #indieweb
    Wed, Jun 28, 2017 10:35pm -07:00
  • Decentralize the Web

    werd.io/2015/signed-feeds-pubsub-a-simple-verb-protocol-a-publisher-and
    continue reading...
    #indieweb #rss #collection
    Sun, Oct 11, 2015 10:56am -07:00
  • Indieweb and RSS - David Shanske (david.shanske.com)
    #indieweb #rss
    Sun, Mar 8, 2015 11:47pm -07:00
  • RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
    With all of the debate lately between RSSCloud versus PubSubHubbub, we wanted to hear from a developer who could actually tell us which one might be better and why. The following guest post is written by Josh Fraser, the co-founder of EventVue, who is an active contributor to PubSubHubbub in his free time.  He has contributed several client libraries for PubSubHubbub including a WordPress plugin. Guess which side of the debate he falls on.
    #PuSH #PubSubHubbub #RSS #rsscloud
    Wed, Feb 11, 2015 9:39pm -08:00
  • #indieweb

    twitter.com/davewiner/status/565208821250162688
    continue reading...
    #indieweb #rss #collection
    Tue, Feb 10, 2015 11:00am -08:00
  • I like blogging software. - Anil Dash (dashes.com)
    but I suspect the hardest part is the client app for readers, which works in a way analogous to an RSS reader or email client, but would have to support a new format and would be optimized for clean reading and subsequent discovery, rather than the three-pane model which has dominated those apps for the last decade or two
    #indieweb #reader #rss
    Wed, Jan 14, 2015 9:44am -08:00
  • How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin (css-tricks.com)
    #wordpress #podcast #rss #indieweb
    Sat, Jan 3, 2015 1:15pm -08:00
  • Ask HN: Do you still use an RSS reader? (news.ycombinator.com)
    #hackernews #indieweb #rss
    Tue, Sep 16, 2014 10:24am -07:00
  • Indieweb and RSS (scripting.com)
    #feeds #indieweb #rss
    Mon, Mar 17, 2014 12:27pm -07:00
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Senior Security Architect at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming and dabble in product design.

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

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