Blogging

There are 133 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 8 of 14).

Demo of MyStatusTool – Twitter using RSS and rssCloud

I have created a proof of concept for a microblogging tool relying on RSS for data storage and rssCloud for notification. I was motivated to do this to show how rssCloud could be used to support a Twitter-like experience. Also, I was blocked for posting an innocuous comment on the FeedLand user feed tool, and felt that there needed to be an alternative to that tool for microblog posting. My earlier posts on the development of this tool are here and here.

In this demo app, the basic functions are:

  • Ability to make a short post
  • When a post is made, a RSS feed is updated, a separate page for the post is created, and the post appears on the home page via Websockets
  • The tool provides hosting for the RSS feed and posts created
  • The tool can display updates to any RSS feeds that support the rssCloud protocol via Websockets (feeds are listed in a configuration file)
  • The contents of the feeds in the configuration file are displayed when the user accesses the page (so they can see what has been posted recently), then any posts with the tool appear at the top of the page

The tool is set up for a single user and requires some configuration. Please consult the README on the Github repo for more information if you want to set up the tool for yourself.

The demo app is available at http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com:443/. The contents of the feeds in the configuration file are displayed, along with any recent posts using the demo app. I encourage people to try making posts and see how they appear and how quickly they appear. As posts continue, so will display of updates to the RSS feeds in the configuration file.

This is a proof of concept, but will be further developed. If you find problems in the tool, or want to suggest features, feel free to create an issue in the Github repo. Also, I would love it if a few other people try installing it and let me know how it goes…

Update on MyStatusTool development

Recently I published a roadmap of the major features for a “Twitter using rssCloud” tool that I am calling MyStatusTool. As of this weekend, I have the major pieces in place (have a text box to enter a short post, to create a RSS feed based on the posts, for each post to have a page, to ping a rssCloud server when a post is live, to have the posts be displayed in reverse-chronological order, and to display posts from other tools that create RSS feeds supporting rssCloud). I spent some time looking at integrating Passport.js to provide multi-user capability, but it turned out to be more than just a day’s worth of work. As a result, I am going to push my current version to Github this weekend after writing some docs. More news to come!

A roadmap for MyStatusTool

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was working on a blog tool not ready to show off yet. Since then, I thought I should follow Colin Walker’s lead in describing some of what I am developing. The working title is MyStatusTool, you can think of it as “Twitter using rssCloud”. The minimum functionality I am working toward is to have a text box to enter a short post, to create a RSS feed based on the posts, for each post to have a page, to ping a rssCloud server when a post is live, to have the posts be displayed in reverse-chronological order, and to display posts from other tools that create RSS feeds supporting rssCloud. This pretty much describes the “Read user feeds…” functionality in FeedLand (link works if you have a FeedLand account). You can also think of the Twitter web user interface as an example. I will probably create a temp Github repo soon to start putting the app under version control. Stay tuned for more updates!

What is the independent web?

I got a comment from a reader yesterday asking what I meant by the phrase “the independent web” in my previous post. In my post, I defined it as “websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it”. An extension of this is using technologies like RSS for checking for site updates and for podcasting, which are not controlled by another platform (even though entities like Spotify and other streaming services would like to “capture and keep users” within their ecosystems). Wanting to double-check, I did some searching to see if there were other references to this phrase. and found a number of links I will add at the end of this post. To me, the key aspect of “independent web” is not being dependent on a silo (like Twitter or Facebook). This can be self-hosting or hosting on a service that provides good export (Micro.blog as an example). I recently wrote a post about how easy should it be to create a website, based on a discussion between several bloggers. The key point of that discussion, to me, was that Twitter/Facebook provides ease of use/setup/no cost, but also a lack of control. To me, if you want to have an independent site, you should be prepared to pay something for it, and the cost of hosting a weblog or website is pretty low. Finally, to me, the use of the term “IndieWeb” has grown somewhat beyond this “independent web” definition to include using technologies like Webmention as part of a website to site-to-site communication. Again, to me sites don’t have to use Webmention to be considered part of the independent web. I hope this helps answer the question my reader had.

Other links on “the independent web”:

Business Insider – The Independent Web

John Battelle – Identity and the Independent Web

Web Designer Depot – What is the Independent Web and Does It Matter in 2021?

Victoria Drake – Make your own independent website

The History of the Web – Toward an independent web

Mental Pivot – Support the independent web

What about the IndieWeb and RSS?

Dave Winer wrote a post with the title “IndieWeb should love RSS” recently, with one of the themes being that the IndieWeb has a lack of support for RSS. I would like to provide a little background from my participation in the IndieWeb community.

In January 2014, I attended a Homebrew Website Club meeting. This was (and still is) a gathering of like-minded people to discuss personal websites and making updates to them. The lead person was Aaron Parecki, one of the IndieWebCamp co-founders. We all introduced ourselves, and shared various opinions on web site development and talked about our individual sites. One of the things mentioned was the use of microformats as a technique/technology for building websites. I had not heard of this before, and looked into it more after the meeting. I then wrote a post on what I was interested in exploring, and one of the items was “following other sites”. What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application. Aaron Parecki even did a hack on the Selfoss feed reader application to allow it to parse microformats-based sites and present site updates like a RSS feed reader would. I even wrote up some instructions on how to set this up (after the fact). In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

Sometime after that, I noticed that both Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik started providing a feed for their sites, although it was really a feed generated by some other application that was parsing their microformats stuff. For the next several years, though, the general trend in the group of websites that considered themselves to be part of the IndieWeb community focused on microformats and technologies that built on microformats as a building block. Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

The more active IndieWeb members (Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik leading the way) have created a number of standards based on technologies grown from implementations on Indieweb websites (Webmention, Microsub, and Micropub). Time will tell if these develop into more mainstream technologies. I think Webmention (supporting site-to-site communication/commenting) is the furthest along (I have it enabled through WordPress plugin on my main site), but I am interested in exploring the others. RSS, though, has stood the test of time, and is still powering feed readers and podcast clients throughout the world. Dave Winer should rightly feel proud of his contributions in this area. RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences. My hope is that they can coexist and at times even work together, but always with respect (as the IndieWeb code of conduct states: “Be respectful of other people, respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered….”).

Checking out IndieBlocks for WordPress

This weekend, I tried out the IndieBlocks plugin for WordPress websites. In 2019, WordPress moved to a new editor for weblog posts called Gutenberg, which uses “blocks” to insert different types of post formats (text, formatted text, video, embeds, etc.). IndieWeb developers had developed a plugin to support different post types, but it used the Classic Editor (now called), and did not support the Gutenberg editor. I played with the “Context” block, and was able to create bookmark, like, and reply posts. I did have a problem with creating a standalone Note using the IndieBlocks plugin (I created it, but it did not appear on the home page). However, the developer said that he is working on the issue.