The idea

I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Feed Readers

Feed readers allow you to ‘follow’ websites something of the same way as you follow accounts on Twitter, mastodon and the like. Feed readers are different in that the feeds they read are, mostly, on the open web. Feed Readers use RSS to pull content from other sites for you to read. If you listen to podcasts in an app you are using a Feed Reader, the app. Podcasts like blog posts are distributed via RSS.

Chris suggests What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds to get started.

My main feed reader is Inoreader. It has been the one I’ve used most since the demise of Google Reader. It allows me to quickly read or skim a lot of blogs and organise that reading in a variety of ways.

More recently I’ve been using FeedLand. FeedLand is a development by Dave Winer who has an amazing pedigree in software development, RSS in particular.

FeedLand is a really interesting product, still under development but ready for use. FeedLand allows you to collate RSS feeds either by adding them yourself or by seeing what feeds other users have added. FeedLand then let’s you to organise, categorise these feeds. FeedLand is a feed reader, so you can read the feeds you follow. FeedLand allow you to publish readers for other folk to read in a few different ways. Here is one hosted on FeedLand and one on my raspberry pi. Both are experiments at the moment. Finally FeedLand allows you to produce a simple feed. Of your own. Here is mine viewed on FeedLand.

Folk to follow

So a couple of people I find it interesting to follow via RSS

  • the dailywebthing linkport one of Joe Jennet’s suite of sharing sites, three links a day. A huge variety of interesting sites. Not so much a gold mine as a gold, silver, bronze, and rock mine. RSS FEED
  • CogDogBlog RSS FEED Alan blogs about education, open, WordPress & Flickr amongs other things. Great detail with a personal touch. I think I’ve been reading him for as long as I’ve been blogging. A wonderful blog.

I am going to try and post for the next couple of Fridays with a wee bit about readers I use and a couple of suggestions for follows.

Listened This is Not a Blog (JIBC Talk) by adminadmin from cog.dog

an invited presentation at the Justice Institute of British Columbia November 30, 2015 http://go.cogdog.it/not-a-blog Abstract While the origin of WordPress was of a platform for the narrative journaling type of online publishing people associate with the word “blog”, as of 2015 the platform now powers more than 25% of all websites. As an extensible web-optimized […]

Listened to & enjoyed Alan’s 2015 talk. He compares WordPress and its approachability, flexibility and extendability with HyperCard. As always interesting & provocative (in the best way). Also HyperCard!

I’ve just read On Reshaping: Tooling WordPress with nothing other than it’s URLs – CogDogBlog

Alan covers many of the interesting url patterns that can produce sets of posts in WordPress. I knew of some, but there are several gems I’d not discovered. Combining dates and taxonomies for example. RSS Feeds for all of these and finally RSS feeds for searches.

Many of these could all be used as links on your site in the same ways as a simple category can be added to a menu. It reminds me of one of my favourite plugins Display Posts which lists posts filtered in every which way. 

The RSS ones might be used to show a dynamic set of links from a different WordPress site. For example Alan mentions HyperCard in his post, by using the url for the RSS feed for a search on his site for HyperCard I can use the RSS block to show search results for HyperCard on Alan’s site:

I don’t usually use the block editor on this site. To insert the RSS block I switched to the block editor, inserted the block and switched back.

This is a bit kludgy but apart from some bother with paragraphs it seems to work.  Once you have added the block and switch back to the classic editor the block is invisible in the Visual view but you see:

<!-- wp:rss {"feedURL":"https://cogdogblog.com/?s=Hypercard\u0026feed=rss2"} /--> in the text editor. You could just save the snippet, and change the url for later use. (Or just use the block editor it seems to be the future).

See also Hidden in the Code – Read Write Respond found via a search for a possilbe featured image

Replied to To Umm or Not To Umm, That is the Audio Editing Question (cogdogblog.com)
the use if “umm” conversationally as a filler, to keep the flow going to signal you have not completed the thought your brain is sending to your mouth

Hi Alan,
Thanks for this.
One thing I liked when I did Radio Edutalk was by doing the show live I felt no pressure to edit the archives, beyond a bit of levelling and trimming my technical problems at the start of a nicecast broadcast.

One of the values, to me, of listening to a podcast is the extra information, often emotional, that is carried by the voice. This research linked might support that premiss.

As podcasting gets a lot more professional, one of the downsides might be the loss of the unedited voice.

Yesterday I read Alan’s post Right? or Choice? To Repair (or Joy Thereof) #DLINQDigDetox – CogDogBlog. One thing in particular caught my eye:

And yes extend broken devices to broken technology. Can’t play old flash content? Try Ruffle.

I’d not heard of Ruffle, but I though it was worth a quick try. I searched my hard drive and was delighted to find  rommy.swf.

Rommy has been reborn several times, born as a HyperCard stack in the 1990s, then a SuperCard project, arriving on the web via the Roadster plugin that ran SuperCard projects. The final incarnation was in flash (although I might have a javascript effort somewhere).

Anyway I uploaded the swf and htlm file, adding the link to the ruffle javascript library & it worked not only that it works on an iPad.

I don’t suppose it is of much use in the classroom now, back in the HyperCard days I though the idea of pupils creating mazes and then getting their partners to write instructions to go through them was a good one. I had not see it else where is such an easy to use fashion.

The featured image is a gif captured with licecap, it doesn’t make the annoying beeping that the real one does.

Replied to What Are You Tuned Into? (cogdogblog.com)
I can also not help to wonder how they listen so much! But that is the beauty of this media form, it being really the only one I know of that you can partake of with attention, while doing something else.

Hi Alan,
A rich list, adding to the already overflowing pool of podcasts. I like to listen to a range of non-Edu podcasts. Even with two 40 minute plus commutes every day I still can’t get through much. Like you I really only listen to podcasts while driving. There are a couple of things that I find useful.

Castro, is a podcasting app that lets you sub to many podcasts but triage the ones you want to hear into you “queue”.

The other is Huffduffer, this is a bookmarklet that will pull individual episodes into your own RSS feed which you can then sub to. It will even rip YouTube videos to audio and host the mp3 for 30 days. https://huffduffer.com/johnjohnston is mine. Now I am off to huffduff some of your suggestions:-)

Replied to a tweet by Alan Levine (Twitter)

I might need a WordPress plugin than converts all links to run them through the Wayback Machine. Mansy days it feels like 90% of my blogged links are dead.

I used amber for a while & stopped for reasons i can’t recall. Used the archive option. Currently got a JavaScript that sorts broken links to my old, now gone school site where a lot of my early links pointed. I now use On This day, thanks Alan, to tend my links most days.

Replied to 1/623 (CogDogBlog)
Hi. There has not been too much nostalgia posting here lately (well actually not much at all, so there). Maybe last June? But who cares if I feel like dipping into my tech past, it’s there. I…

Hi Alan,
One of the first 623 sites! Blows my mind. Way beyond early adopter.

There should be a badge or medal.