The idea

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

Feed Readers

Another sort of RSS reader is a Podcatcher. Podcast listening apps depend on RSS. My favourite on my phone, I listen to podcasts while commuting, is Castro.

Folk to Follow

RSS Feeds this week:

The idea

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

Folk to Follow

Chris Aldrich, who started #FeedReaderFriday has a great feed, but I also follow his hypothes.is stream Feed. I don’t use hypothes.is myself, and the number of items in the feed would be overwhelming if you tried to keep up, but it contains many nuggets that you would not find elsewhere.

Not a person but tinywords: haiku & other small poems has an RSS Feed

Feed Reader Tip

Ignore the unread count. Some feed readers show you the number of unread items. forget FOMO and ignore items, feeds and the whole thing if you have something else to do.

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.

The idea

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

Feed Readers

Just after I discover RSS in the “flowering” of theScotEduBlogs community I got interested in aggregating RSS and creating specialised readers. Back in around 2006 I was blogging some ideas which lead to Robert Jones & Pete Liddle creating the first iteration of the ScotEduBlogs aggregation. Later I moved the site to WordPress using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I’d seen this in use on the marvellous DS106 site which aggregates blogs of students and open participants of the many iterations of the notorious Digital Storytelling course. The flow on DS106 has pulled in 91749 (at time of writing) posts since 2010.

ScotEduBlogs is at a bit of a low at the moment, there are not so many folk blogging about education in Scotland. I still love the idea of ‘specialist’ or community aggregations or feed readers. Of course the site has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Dave Winer’s FeedLand, which I noted in a previous #FeedReaderFriday, can also create ‘News Products’ with similar results.

Folk to Follow

I like to follow some human aggregators, even better if they add their own opinions. One of my favourites in Arron Davis his Read Write Collect blog is an IndieWeb style collector of replies, bookmarks and other responses. RSS.

Some of Tom Woodward’s Bionic Teaching – utan blixt consists of his harvest of links with brief comment. This might be auto posted, perhaps from pinboard? He also posts about higher ed use of technology and, of particular interest to me, his work with WordPress. RSS

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.

The idea

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

Back around 2005 I was learning to blog with my class and exploring blogging. I was on a train with Ewan Mcintosh going to a conference or training event. Ewan was using NetNewWire and showed me how he used it. I’d already got the app, probably from a Mac magazine cover disk, but not really understood it. Watching Ewan read, take notes & blog, everything clicked. I do not think there have been many days since I’ve not used RSS.

Feed Readers

Micro.blog if a interesting product. Part blogging service part network. To me micro.blog’s superpower is that the community is open to anyone with an RSS feed. I don’t host with micro.blog but send in a category of my blog which becomes a first class member of the community. Using the app I can read other micro bloggers, some hosted with micro.blog some elsewhere. I can also add any RSS feed to micro.blog so I can follow them without leaving the app. I don’t do this often but it is handy. The app is not my main feed reader but a handy additional tool. Micro.blog is also one of the nicest online communities I’ve come across. Manton has carefully designed it to avoid some the problems of other networks, no follower accounts or favourites. Micro.blog has a lot more than this brief note covers. Manton also wrote the Indie Microblogging book. You can read the whole thing online.

Folk to follow

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

Caught by the River | RSS Feed

Caught by the River is an arts/nature/culture clash … an online meeting place for pursuits of a distinctly non-digital variety — walking, fishing, looking, thinking, birdsong and beer, adventure and poetry; life’s small pleasures, in all their many flavours — it was, and still is, about stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature. Finding new rhythms. Being.

Open Culture | RSS Feed Hard to describe, at the top of the page today: A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nosewise, Garlik, Havegoodday & More. The best free cultural & educational media on the web

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.

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.