Tags: rss

Blogs Are Back

A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.

Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.

The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.

And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.

The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.

Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.

Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.

The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!

Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.

If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.

The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:

Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.

The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:

• 13 Minutes—the space race, from the perspective of the United States.
• The Bomb—the nuclear arms race, from Los Alamos to Cuba.
• The Santiago Boys—the CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist democracy in Chile.

Ethan tagged me in a post. I didn’t feel a thing.

“I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters”, he wrote.

My immediate thought was that I don’t actually subscribe to many newsletters. But then I remembered that most newsletters are available as RSS feeds, and I very much do subscribe to those.

Reading RSS and reading email feel very different to me. A new item in my email client feels like a task. A new item in my feed reader feels like a gift.

Anyway, I poked around in my subscriptions and found some newsletters in there that I can heartily recommend.

First and foremost, there’s The History Of The Web by Jay Hoffman. Each newsletter is a building block for the timeline of the web that he’s putting together. It’s very much up my alley.

On the topic of the World Wide Web, Matthias has a newsletter called Own Your Web:

Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. ❤✊

On the inescapable topic of “AI”, I can recommend Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter by Professor Emily M. Bender and Doctor Alex Hanna.

Journalist Clive Thompson has a fun newsletter called The Linkfest:

The opposite of doomscrolling: Every two weeks (roughly) I send you a collection of the best Internet reading I’ve found — links to culture, technology, art and science that fascinated me.

If you like that, you’ll love The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:

A newsletter for the terminally curious

Okay, now there are three more newsletters that I like, but I’m hesitant to recommend for the simple reason that they’re on Substack alongside a pile of racist trash. If you decide you like any of these, please don’t subscribe by email; use the RSS feed. For the love of Jeebus, don’t give Substack your email address.

Age of Invention by Anton Howes is a deep, deep dive into the history of technology and industry:

I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers.

Finally, there are two newsletters written by people whose music I listened to in my formative years in Ireland…

When We Were Young by Paul Page recounts his time in the band Whipping Boy in the ’90s:

This will be the story of Whipping Boy told from my perspective.

Toasted Heretic were making very different music around the same time as Whipping Boy. Their singer Julian Gough has gone on to write books, poems, and now a newsletter about cosmology called The Egg And The Rock:

The Egg and the Rock makes a big, specific argument (backed up by a lot of recent data, across many fields), that our universe appears to be the result of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.

There you go—quite a grab bag of newsletter options for you.

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

GetRSSFeed: RSS Feed Extractor & Finder for Websites, Blogs & Podcasts

This looks handy: a service to extract the RSS feed of a podcast (y’know—the thing that actually makes a podcast a podcast) from walled gardens that obfuscate the feed’s location: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.

(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s literally run by a nazi.)

I also used to have some Twitter bots. There were Twitter accounts for my blog and for my links. A simple If-This-Then-That recipe would poll my RSS feeds and then post an update whenever there was a new item.

I had something something similar going for The Session. Its Twitter bot has been replaced with automated accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky (I couldn’t use IFTTT directly to post to Bluesky from RSS, but I was able to set up Buffer to do the job).

I figured The Session’s Twitter account would probably just stop working at some point, but it seems like it’s still going.

Hah! I spoke too soon. I just decided to check that URL and nothing is loading. Now, that may just be a temporary glitch because Alan Musk has decided to switch off a server or something. Or it might be that the account has been cancelled because of how I modified its output.

I’ve altered the IFTTT recipe so that whenever there’s a new item in an RSS feed, the update is posted to Twitter along with a message like “Please use Bluesky or Mastodon instead of Twitter” or “Please stop using Twitter/X”, or “Get off Twitter—please. It’s a cesspit” or “If you’re still on Twitter, you’re supporting a fascist.”

That’s a start but I need to think about how I can get the bot to do as much damage as possible before it’s destroyed.

Full RSS feed

Oh, this is a very handy service from Paul—given the URL of an RSS feed that only has summaries, it will attempt to get the full post content from the HTML.

I described using my feed reader like this:

I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.

Instead it’s like this:

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.

It also feels different to social media. Like Lucy Bellwood says:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

There’s also the blessed lack of any algorithm:

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.

Cory Doctorow has been praising the merits of RSS:

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface.

Like Lucy, he emphasises the lack of algorithm:

By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

The only algorithm at work in my feed reader—or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate. Like this morning, when I read this from Alice:

There is no better feeling than walking along, lost in my own thoughts, and feeling a small hand slip into mine. There you are. Here I am. I love you, you silly goose.

And then I read this from Denise

I pass a mother and daughter, holding hands. The little girl is wearing a sequinned covered jacket. She looks up at her mother who says “…And the sun’s going to come out and you’re just going to shine and shine and shine.”

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

What RSS Needs

I love my feed reader:

Feed readers are an example of user agents: they act on behalf of you when they interact with publishers, representing your interests and preserving your privacy and security. The most well-known user agents these days are Web browsers, but in many ways feed readers do it better – they don’t give nearly as much control to sites about presentation and they don’t allow privacy-invasive technologies like cookies or JavaScript.

Also:

Feed support should be built into browsers, and the user experience should be excellent.

Agreed!

However, convincing the browser vendors that this is in their interest is going to be challenging – especially when some of them have vested interests in keeping users on the non-feed Web.

Podcast AP

Here’s a handy service that allows you to follow a Mastodon account that updates when a new podcast episode is released from any podcast you like.

RsS iS dEaD LOL

This is a wonderful service! Pop your Mastodon handle into this form and you can see which of your followers have websites with RSS feeds you can subscribe to.

MastoFeed - Send your RSS Feeds to Mastodon

This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.

Where have all the websites gone? – Chris Coyier

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg

The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.

I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):

By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.

RSS Anything

Next time you’re frustrated by a website that doesn’t provide an RSS feed, try using this tool:

Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed

RSS Parrot

Here’s a handy service that allows you to use Mastodon as an RSS reader!

Social networks come and social networks go.

Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.

Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.

I used to have a checkbox in my posting interface that said “Twitter”. If I wanted to add a copy of one of my notes to Twitter, I’d enable that toggle.

I have, of course, now removed that checkbox. Twitter is dead to me (and it should be dead to you too).

I used to have another checkbox next to that one that said “Flickr”. If I was adding a photo to one of my notes, I could toggle that to send a copy to my Flickr account.

Alas, that no longer works. Flickr only allows you to post 1000 photos before requiring a pro account. Fair enough. I’ve actually posted 20 times that amount since 2005, but I let my pro membership lapse a while back.

So now I’ve removed the “Flickr” checkbox too.

Instead I’ve now got a checkbox labelled “Mastodon” that sends a copy of a note to my Mastodon account.

When I publish a blog post like the one you’re reading now here on my journal, there’s yet another checkbox that says “Medium”. Toggling that checkbox sends a copy of my post to my page on Ev’s blog.

At least it used to. At some point that stopped working too. I was going to start debugging my code, but when I went to the documentation for the Medium API, I saw this:

This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 2, 2023. It is now read-only.

I guessed I missed the memo. I guess Medium also missed the memo, because developers.medium.com is still live. It proudly proclaims:

Medium’s Publishing API makes it easy for you to plug into the Medium network, create your content on Medium from anywhere you write, and expand your audience and your influence.

Not a word of that is accurate.

That page also has a link to the Medium engineering blog. Surely the announcement of the API deprecation would be published there?

Crickets.

Moving on…

I have an account on Bluesky. I don’t know why.

I was idly wondering about sending copies of my notes there when I came across a straightforward solution: micro.blog.

That’s yet another place where I have an account. They make syndication very straightfoward. You can go to your account and point to a feed from your own website.

That’s it. Syndication enabled.

It gets better. Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.

It’s like dominoes falling: I post something on my website which updates my RSS feed which gets picked up by micro.blog which passes it on to Bluesky.

I noticed that one of the other services that micro.blog can post to is Medium. Hmmm …would that still work given the abandonment of the API?

I gave permission to micro.blog to cross-post to Medium when my feed of blog posts is updated. It seems to have worked!

We’ll see how long it lasts. We’ll see how long any of them last. Today’s social media darlings are tomorrow’s Friendster and MySpace.

When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge

Wanna get angry all over again?

(Now do Geocities!)

Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting

A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.

Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. That’s good. We don’t want a 927 situation.

My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetization—I hope they don’t attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.

The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

Define “innovation”.