RSS: there’s nothing better

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David Yates wrote a great defense of RSS which I completely agree with. To summarize the salient points:

  • RSS is open
  • RSS works
  • RSS is very well-supported by a lot of things
  • RSS is a suitable name as shorthand for “RSS/Atom” because the name “Atom” is overloaded and basically anything that supports Atom also supports RSS and vice-versa

(Note that there’s one inaccuracy in that since that article was written, Twitter has moved over to algorithmic manipulation of the timeline. This can currently be disabled but who knows how long that’ll last?)

Most IndieWeb folks are also really gung-ho about mf2 and h-feed, and while I don’t see any reason not to support it (and it certainly does have some advantages in terms of it being easier to integrate into a system that isn’t feed-aware or convenient to set up multiple templates), I’ve run into plenty of pitfalls when it comes to actually adding mf2 markup to my own site (for example, having to deal with ambiguities with nesting stuff and dealing with below-the-fold content, not to mention a lot of confusion over things like p-summary vs. e-content), and so far there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to doing so since everything that supports h-feed also supports RSS/Atom, as far as I’m aware.

For me the only obvious advantage to h-feed is that you can add it to one-size-fits-none templating systems like Tumblr where you don’t have any control over the provided RSS feed, but in those situations there’s not really a lot more added flexibility you’re going to get by adding h-feed markup anyway. I guess it also makes sense if you’re hand-authoring your static site, but that just means it becomes even easier to get things catastrophically wrong.

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Keeping it personal

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I just read this great essay by Matthias Ott. It does a great job of summarizing the state of affairs of blogging and social media, and how we can try to escape the current orbit to get back to where the web was meant to be.

I especially like the bit about “Don’t do it like me. Do it like you.” Because that is exactly why I’ve been building Publ the way I have; I have specific goals in mind for how I manage, maintain, and organize my site, and these goals are very different than what other existing blogging and site-management software has in mind. The fact that I post so many different kinds of content and that they need different organizational structures to make sense makes this a somewhat unique problem. I’d like to think that Publ is a very general piece of web-publishing software, but it’s probably so general because I have such specific needs. Which makes for an interesting paradox, I suppose.

I guess what I’m saying is that I want to see more types of web-based publishing where the schema and layout fit the content, not the other way around. But it also needs to be able to interoperate with other stuff, while still making sense from a producer-consumer UX perspective.

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