Increasing the surface area of blogging | Hacker News Reader

Increasing the surface area of blogging

tomcritchlow.com

169 pointsedavis48 comments

> OPML is an outliner technology that simply links to a bunch of feeds. Here’s an example of an OPML file from Vaughn Tan. Nice.

> The problem with feeds is that they render in the browser like a bunch of code. They’re not at all user friendly.

I read this and was thinking oh no! No! You can absolutely make it readable!

And then it turned out he linked to mine. :D

If you want something a bit less over-the-top and more sensible, Ton has one: https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml

https://maya.land/blogroll.opml is also one the best examples I've seen.

I think this is OP's.

yup haha

Reading the post I was itching to point out XSL style sheets. They're so useful but underutilized. They're not the easiest to write and there's essentially no good tooling around them.

indeed, neat e.g. for nicely (with modifiable styling) viewing immutable raw data like messages: https://mro.name/microblog

Have mutable design on immutable data is awesome for long-term concerns. And having the data raw!

The raw data + styling model is ideal to me. You've got one data endpoint for both people and machines that's equally useful to both.

I wonder why it's seen so rare. Are people afraid to disclose the data? Ignorance about the possibility? SEO?

It's a little bit of all of those factors.

In the early days of XSLT client side support was limited. IE still dominated the web in the early 2000s. IE 5/5.5 only supported the XSLT working draft and made up more than half of IE's market share. In 2001 if you were excited about client side XSLT it was only available to fewer than half of your visitors at best.

You could do XSLT on the server side and spit out HTML but that was just one of several ways of converting your raw data to HTML. For most developers it was easier to go from a SQL database through ASP, PHP, or whatever to HTML.

So in the early days it didn't gain much momentum. By the time browsers supporting client side XSLT were dominant AJAX was pretty well established as the new hot thing. JavaScript was ingesting XML with little interest in having the browser handle it directly.

The tooling in the early days wasn't that good either. Dreamweaver 8 added support around 2005 but I think by then the AJAX train had sailed. Before then developing an XSL stylesheet meant a lot of rerunning a processor and reloading a page. For the same effort you could just do the work in PHP or ASP and get more programmability.

Today everyone has a browser capable of doing client side XSLT very efficiently but XML is seen as old and crusty. No one wants to go back and learn XSLT because most developers seem to have doubled down on JavaScript.

Since XML as an endpoint format has been ignored for so long I would bet it doesn't have a good SEO story. While it can carry all the metadata Google or Facebook wants, if they don't crawl it then it doesn't matter.

Not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing.

> Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (80004004) > https://maya.land/assets/opml.xsl

Hmm -- it looks to me like it works? Not sure what's up there, sorry about that.

Trying again I can download the file, but that's it.

I feel like OPML was designed as a “Export/Import” format, and that has led to it being underused.

OMPL URLs hosting lists of feeds should be automatically updated across feed readers following an OPML feed. You should be able to “subscribe” to OPML feeds the way you subscribe to RSS feeds.

The only reader I’m aware that supports this is Tt-rss. FreshRSS plans to support it soon: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/issues/4191

I think this ability will allow for a lot of important, and cool usecases (your follow list on Twitter/YouTube/GitHub) is just an OPML feed that you subscribe to.

Miniflux lets you import an OPML file from a URL (as well as download/upload), but it doesn't automatically update anything.

OPML has always seemed to me to be a hugely underused technology. A list of someone's feeds is a reasonable indicator of their interests, and bashing different OPML files together feels like it'd be a good way of finding other people with interests that cross with your own.

Related: I've only just now signed up for a newsletter on Substack and it turns out SS is basically a feed reader. Like - the iOS app is literally a feed reader. A list of articles, the concept of what is read vs unread, a vague stab at a discovery mechanism. It's Feedly, only not as good.

I hadn't realised how much hype surrounds so little that is actually new...

OPML is/was criminally underused. I think that lies at the feet of Wordpress. Early Wordpress supported a blogroll but needed a plug-in for OPML support. Wordpress then moved blogroll support before finally removing it.

The (arguably) most popular blogging system ignoring OPML meant feeds were much rarer than RSS. The rarity of OPML feeds kept them from getting any native browser support. Most of the time you only see them as a way to import/export a list of feeds from dedicated RSS readers.

Sub-stack isn't a tech company, its a media outlet that focuses on monetizing semi-famous blog-writers. I guess it has less of a schtick than many media outlets, besides contrarian, "the mainstream is dumb" style takes.

So I was thinking about the fediverse and blogging, and if we already have blogs then why not publish them using ActivityPub? As in, using your fediverse account to follow blogs instead of just other federated accounts.

I know there is an rss-activitypub server out there. Are there other projects/solutions like that? Something that'll work for static blogs?

Maybe not really what you have in mind, but write.as as a blogging platform I think supports distribution of new posts through activitypub. I might be wrong about that though, as I never looked into it closely.

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure about syndication. Something server-like, but my blog is static (as are many others), so perhaps syndication is the only way?

I agree that thus seems like a near ideal use case for something like IPFS or something decentralized and/or federated.

You could ask around the indieweb irc, https://chat.indieweb.org/ Some of the people there have messed around with syndicating to ActivityPub. I think one of them maintains a Wordpress activitypub plugin

Great suggestion, I'll check it the indieweb link

This seems like it would replicate Google Reader's (PBUH) social features, which would be a great idea.

write.as and https://writefreely.org/ are what you want, but static and activitypub don't reallllyyyy go together without shims in the middle.

If you are interested in alternative feed representation, I'd invite you to give a go to my feed reader that was inspired by Fraidyc.at, yet offers a bit more configuration. For example, setting different priority per feed source or category, and how many items you'd like to see per source. That way, you get to have more control over what you read.

And it offers full OPML import/export. I.e. you can come and go whenever you want. The project is https://lenns.io

p.s. there's also the option to subscribe to site-headlines if a "blog"/site doesn't offer an RSS feed. That works automagically in 80-90% of the cases in which you'd expect it to work :)

Sorry for being rude but... If you offer code to host the service autonomously we can came and go, otherwise being just able to import/export feeds is lock-in: already read feeds, saved articles, UI etc are the lock-in elements, for a serious RSS user.

If your target is just offering an aggregator like "Google News for the content you want", well, I can understand but for people who want to control their source of information, reducing propaganda and crap of modern websites/services, it's not a real option...

Demo or screenshots would help quite a bit, imho.

Solid idea. But as others have said a demo or some example screen caps would be nice.

I heard somewhere that RSS is actually more popular than it's ever been because its used under the surface for apple podcasts.

Not sure if thats true but it sounds true so maybe it's true.

PS I love RSS, it plays by Tim BL's rule of simple rules make complex ecosystems.

Given all the itunes custom tags I see in RSS feeds of some of the podcasts I listen to I'd say that's a safe bet.

Unfortunately there's a growing interest in building walled gardens around podcasts. It used to be just RSS and audio.

Yeah, it's a bummer. I actually appreciate that iTunes still exposes the underlying RSS feed (at least programmatically), because for some podcasts that only link to walled-garden platforms, it's the only way to reveal the RSS feed.

> The problem with feeds is that they render in the browser like a bunch of code

This wasn't always the case.

Even when browsers don't explicitly support RSS feeds they can be transformed with XSL. A dedicated feed reader will ignore the XSL reference but the browser will do the transform and give you HTML which can itself reference CSS for nice styling.

Yup. Firefox had RSS support from first release in 2002 (inherited from Netscape, so even older than that) until 2018 when Mozilla decided it wasn't a priority.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18202028

https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...

I don't think Chrome ever supported RSS, though.

I was just thinking the other day about how I wish there was a social network with the rhythm/vibes of email and hey look, fraidycat turns whatever into basically that!

Add Webmentions and you have a roughshod social network. You can get the river of content and their replies :)

need a way to link microblogging with long form blogging and viceversa. but effortlessly, when you make a comment in twitter you should be able to link it to a particular post in long form, or not, but without having to chew up character count or screen space with a long form URL.

and you want to be able to post a long form blog and "collect" micro posts of your and maybe others into it as well.

> Turns out you can do the same thing with OPML files. Here’s an OPML file nicely styled for the browser.

Clicking on that with Safari has the first row flickering a lot for some reason.

Huh. Mobile Safari? Looks okay on mac safari.

On macOS, screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/HCcUPC1

A different point of view: why blogging (witch is not that anyway)? Normally is for telling something to a public. Now arrive the visibility issue: if to have a public you need constantly publishing or you are a media company or your quality at a certain point in time decrease and you just enter the common "sci-pattern" of publish-or-perish, with equal results: a big load of crap who hide the little quality that still exists. RSS help because allow the public to follow rare-posting inconstant sources issueless: if you select not too few nor too many you get daily content around the desired quantity still noticing any new content from the sources you like.

At that point arrive the discoverability problem: how to find good contents.

IMVHO the sole way is the classic Usenet: a public aggregator no one really own of cohorts of people with similar interests (groups) BUT not limiting them to any particular cohort (subscribe groups you like at Reddit we divide users by, at Facebook by, ...) because those groups are formed out of their posters for their poster interests NOT for some corporate/business purpose.

Essentially: the classic usenet + the classic web 1.0. The web part is just a way to see content and decide, RSS is the mean to read it once selected, ngs to follow changes. Anything else I know/see is by large far less effective.

What do you think of Reddit? Subreddits have kinda replaced usenet groups of old. OR is it too much moderation for you?

Also how to handle spam, thats been a killer for usenet lately

> Subreddits have kinda replaced usenet groups of old.

Ah, but USENet is decentralised, Reddit is not.

> Also how to handle spam, thats been a killer for usenet lately

Last time I checked, the spam still being posted on USENet is Zombie-spam by long forgotten bots. A strong kill-list in a good client should easily minimise that problem.

There has been a revival of USENet by the smolnet and Web 1.0 people - some of the groups are active with almost no spam.

You forgot the pirate part: Radarr/Lidarr/Sonarr/NZBGet/* or paid binary groups. A showcase of how usenet archaic arch is still far more powerful than modern web ones...

As another user commented above: Reddit was a company, Usenet is owned by no one, you can create your own groups, share groups you like not only from you etc. Moderation on Usenet in some groups might have been strong but far from Reddit: on Reddit mods are "Gods", on Usenet mods can be pushed out simply contacting enough users via mail or some other group. They are not that powerful.

Also on Usenet scoring, killfiles etc are yours so you can ban my posts because you do not like them, but others will see them, while on Reddit if a mod ban someone it's for all or no one.

Spam on usenet was and issue because at that time antispam was not good as today, today we can filter spam enough, if just there is enough interested public. So far usenet is far from being dead, it's used by few to share mostly pirate binary contents like Radarr/Lidarr/Sonarr series. With commercial orgs. That's not usenet of course, but that's still possible and it's useful enough to prove it's strength and flexibility.

Just see another example: Popcorn Time. A super-success people have abandoned simply because instead of install an app most prefer going to streaming websites, not really because of legal actions or ban. ZeroNet is built on the same principle, it's legal, made to share websites, nearly no one seems to be interested again because they can find some place to write text hosted by someone else. Or: the issue is cultural not technical. People en masse do not comprehend the meaning of freedom so they ignore it until it's tangibly lost and at that time it's too late.

Against such phenomenon there is no technical solution, only social ones...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com