An Atom feed of blog posts that I’ve enjoyed—and you can follow
Just looking for the link? You’re after Shares
Blogs are back—they never really left—and there’s so much good stuff out there, but it’s hard to share it. I can favourite stuff all I like in my RSS reader but nobody will ever know. So how can with my tiny voice help let other people know what’s out there?
Well I’ve jury-rigged a solution that might work to bridge that gap, but unfortunately is a bit niche on my end: since FreshRSS version 1.24 it’s been possible to share an RSS feed of what it opaquely calls a “user query” which can be of anything: a category, a search, your favourites, or as I’m doing a manually applied label of feed items I want to share. This isn’t ideal (I can’t apply that label on my phone app for one) but I think it’s serviceable.
Now, I’m not going to link you to the actual RSS feed that FreshRSS produces; I’ve created a script1 that actually parses the json version of the feed, strips some unneeded or private metadata,2 and turns it into an atom feed rather than RSS.
Think of this either as a collection of reposts on tumblr or cohost or as a personally curated version of Sortition Social, a site where posts from submitted blogs are chosen by lottery and which is also a feed you should be following.3 I’m hoping it will be a good time for all. Because I don’t always read things I follow in chronological order you’ll not get them in a timely fashion, so if there’s something you find you like please subscribe directly rather than waiting for me to get around to it. The topic of the feed is eclectic on account of being drawn just from stuff I read myself—I make no apologies for that—but if you enjoy anything on this site you’ll enjoy these things more.
I don’t know if this is possible with other feed readers; I certainly hope it is. We should have a way to share good stuff that doesn’t rely on a single website, even a fourth one.
How can you follow the feed? Well, I’m assuming you have a feed reader, this is the year 20XX after all—you’re going to want to copy the url of the Shares feed into it. Or I guess you can wait around for me to do a roundup of a small handful of them with a bit of commentary; I do that sometimes I promise.
Email me if you want a copy of it for yourself; I don’t have a good place to put it at the moment.↩︎
Along with iframes, which some blogs use for their comments and which are sometimes included in their own feeds. Where this kind of editing has occurred it will be marked in the processed version.↩︎
Speaking of though if you see your stuff in here and don’t want it included, contact me and I’ll happily remove it.↩︎