Blogging

There are 107 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 1 of 11).

Updates on building a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was able to use a reference app to test rssCloud support for WordPress.com sites and WordPress.org sites. Since then, I have migrated some of the features in the reference app into a demo instance of MyStatusTool, the app I developed in 2022-2023 to provide a Twitter-like experience using rssCloud for notification. Here is a screenshot of the demo instance:

Currently, the app is subscribed to 11 WordPress.com sites, 1 WordPress.org site, and 6 non-WordPress sites. I did perform tests to confirm that all of these three types of rssCloud sites appeared within seconds on my demo instance. Woohoo! I will let this demo instance run for several days to check the re-subscribe function, but I think this is a good enough start to plan for a rollout of the feed-based social network.

My thoughts on Inbound RSS

Dave Winer recently wrote a summary of what he calls “Inbound RSS”, and Rob Fahrni and Manton Reece also contributed to the conversation. Rob had a great one-line summary in this Bluesky post:

Basically when you publish RSS that’s outbound. If you read it and do something with it, that’s inbound.

Now, where are some examples of this “in the wild” – who has this deployed? And why should we care?

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. I take advantage of this to publish posts from my WordPress blog that I want to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Some platforms allow users to post via email (I found WordPress and Blogger, after a quick search). However, my impression is that people who have blogs use the interface provided within the blogging tool to create posts, and few people use alternate methods to post. So, from a quick search session, one blog tool that takes RSS as input to create posts.

In Dave Winer’s post, we can see that he wants to be able to post to other services (Substack, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) by using an editor of his choice and providing a RSS feed to the service, which is then processed by the service into posts. This becomes even more clear after searching his blog for mentions of “Inbound RSS”. My response is: Good luck with that! Why should those services care, or make this available to users? What is the “win” for them. Moreover, what is good for the goose should be good for the gander, right? Of the blogging tools that Dave Winer has developed (1999.io, Old School tool within Drummer, Fargo), none of them has supported this feature. Why not?

In conclusion, I think that “Inbound RSS” as a publishing technique can be implemented by anyone (it’s only software, right? we can do anything in software, right?). Whether there is a business case for this, or a market for this, is for me an open question.

Reference: Paying for the development of software

Dave Winer has created a new Bluesky account for political news, and is planning to create a “river of news” site for feeds (placeholder here). Dave has other news rivers (as well as my news rivers for general feeds and WordLand users), so nothing new here in terms of technology but good to get more rivers out there. I applaud any effort to “own your social net“.

UPDATE 3/31/2025: Dave Winer changed the URLs for the Bluesky account and the placeholder site (see reference)

What the “Writer’s Web” means to me

Crossposted from my WordLand test blog:

I am responding to Dave Winer’s call for posts about his post “The Writer’s Web“. 

I never left “The Writer’s Web”, as my primary web presence is my WordPress blog, where I have all the benefits of not having a tiny little text box, and support for all aspects of Textcasting, as defined by Dave Winer. I have never relied on social media as a place for my writing, so I have not been “hampered” by the user interface of such tools.

I think that WordLand will appeal to a set of users – how big that set will be is TBD. 

I do have two quibbles about  “The Writer’s Web”. For the part about “Open, for real” – sounds good, still waiting to see “the source code”. For the part about “We know how to do this. The only question is whether we choose to.”, that “we” sounds like the royal “We” to me. You go first, Dave, then maybe others will follow.

What should a social network have?

I am cross-posting this from my WordLand blog.

The mention of a social network built around RSS has come up again. I added my off-the-cuff thoughts on this topic in this post, but I also wanted to review Dave Winer’s description on the rssCloud website:

There are three sides to the cloud:#

  • The authoring tool. I edit and update a feed. It contains a element that says how a subscriber should request to notification of updates.#
  • The cloud. It is notified of an update, and then in turn notifies all subscribers.#
  • The subscriber. A feed reader, aggregator, whatever — that subscribes to feeds that may or may not be part of a cloud. #

I think that these three elements are the minimum features for a social network to exist. By breaking this down into three parts, it is easier to see that multiple applications cane be created or assembled to create a social network. It does not have to be an “all-in-one” application (like Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). Users can use whatever tool they want to create their content, and they can use whatever tool they want to consume the content. Finally, both of those tools can interact with a “cloud server” which performs notification. 

So why has this idea/concept not gained traction? I think there are several reasons. Many authoring tools create feeds, but do not support notification. Many subscriber apps read feeds, but on more of a “polling” basis, and not because the app has been notified that a feed has updated. To me, these are places where innovation could start.

I have been waiting for “someone else” to do this work, but “no one” has stepped in to start, so I am going to try adding some “notification” features to some other blogging tools. I would be remiss if I did not point out that there is a RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress blogs, and WordPress.com supports rssCloud. In my experience, though, my self-hosted WordPress blog has not experienced “real-time” performance due to caching of the RSS feed by my host, Bluehost. I have tried many ways to turn this off, with no success.  Anyway, there is nothing “stopping” me from innovating here, so here goes!

Continuing conversation about conversation on social media

Ken Smith recently wrote a post about conversations on social media, and I wish to contribute to this conversation. I think it is possible to have meaningful conversations on social media, although I have not participated in very many. The ones that worked were pretty much one-on-one conversations (so not hundreds of people replying to a post). To me, there can be abuse and trolls, and these can make conversation difficult if not impossible. However, to me sometimes people online act like they would like to have conversation, but block replies that they do not agree with, and to me this discourages true conversation. Perhaps the best online conversation opportunities are within a small group or circle of friends, as often happens in real life. Just sharing some thoughts here….

A linkblogging update

I have continued to use Hugo to maintain two link blogs (linkblog.andysylvester.com, a random collection of links, and liveblog47.andysylvester.com a collection of news live blog links on the second Trump presidency), and I thought it was a good time to share an update. I am using the Anubis2 theme that I saw on Jack Baty’s site. I am using Visual Studio Code to create the Markdown files. My approach for the linkblog site is to present a link and the title of the piece or short excerpt. I have not been entirely successful (sometimes I am just pasting the links in a file at the end of the day), but by using Hugo, I can go back at a later time and edit the files easily to fill in information and re-render the site. By switching folders within Visual Studio Code, the editor opens the most recently edited file, which is easy to save as a new file.

In the Liveblog47 site, I wanted to have a record of Trump news, but not have to spend a lot of time tracking down posts to link to. CNN has a pretty regular live blog page daily, so as long as I can check CNN during the day, I can save that link, and paste it in a new file. The URL naming is sometimes inconsistent, so checking each day is pretty much a requirement. I had a site during the 2024 election (Kamala Campaign Timeline) which ended up taking a lot of time, and I did not want to invest that much time in Trump news.

Overall, I am pleased with the link blogs so far. I feel better having the links in a site online, rather than a big link dump file on my hard drive. At least they are live…

Announcing WordLand Bloggers River of News

I am a firm believer in the “river of news” way of reading RSS feeds. Dave Winer has created several “river of news” RSS aggregators (the latest is River5, available on Github). As part of this effort, Dave also created some tools for display of a river of news in a single-page application, using the output from River5. I have created one of these river applications (WordLand Bloggers River of News) to keep up with the WordLand user blogs. If you want to have your WordLand blog added to the river, email me at sylvester.andy@gmail.com. Let’s keep blogging!

Giving WordLand a try

I was not planning on trying WordLand by Dave Winer, but after seeing a post from Ken Smith on X, and reading Dave’s post about it today, I decided the way I could add value would be to create a “first-time user” video – an “unboxing”, so to speak. Executive summary: WordLand successfully posted to a test WordPress.com site I created, the video appears below.

SIDE NOTE: Camtasia, the video capture/editing program SUCKS! At around 1:50 in the video, the audio suddenly sped up and made me sound like a chipmunk! I had to use Audacity to fix the audio – DISGUSTING! Camtasia costs hundreds of dollars – not worth it!