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New version of Blogroll Browser
There’s a new version of the blogroll browser this morning.
Each item links to the OPML and HTML files it came from.
There’s a menubar where more commands will appear.
The display should be less jittery as I tuned up the CSS a bit.
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A blogroll lab
I wanted to see what was out there in blogrolls, so I wrote an app that started from my own blogroll, and looked for feeds I was subscribed to that also had blogrolls, following the conventions we outlined in March.
It then starts at each of the blogrolls I found in my list, and did the same thing with them, until I ran out of lists to look at.
And the whole thing runs again a few minutes later.
It found a bunch of them, so then I threw together a simple user interface that lets you click on the title of a blogroll in a list in the left panel, and view the actual blogroll in the right panel. Here’s a screen shot.
You can see it at browser.blogroll.social.
A caveat – what you see here is just an experiment. I don’t expect this app to be up for any period of time. It’s here just to learn from. Part of a bootstrap perhaps.
PS: Cross-posted on my blog.
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it's a spam spam spam spam world
manton, i listened to your podcast from this week, first time listener, first time caller.
i think much of the discourse on the open web basically amounts to spam.
trying to get a lift in their online notoriety by siphoning it from you, so the more you have, the more you attract. and the more you interact the more they indict and convict you. ;-)
i didn’t understand it when i first got that kind of spam, but it got ridiculous after a while. people who thought they could make fortunes by taking over stuff that by design couldn’t make any money at all. ;-)
in other words the open world attracts a lot of greed, implemented by spamming you with vitriol.
if steve jobs had actively participated like you and i did, he would have attracted the most vitriolic spam ever.
the trick if you can handle it is to be scarce online, do your work in private. but i can’t do that myself. so a fair amount of my effort online goes into avoiding this kind of spamming. it comes at a cost. e.g. no more mail lists, gave that up a few years ago. and i spent four years just writing software for myself, without publishing or promoting any of it, and i actually liked that a lot.
who knows what’s next. but you’re a nice person who really cares. and i expect you may not hear that enough, so i wanted to say it.
keep on truckin…
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Looking for feeds with blogrolls
I’m working on a bit of demo software and need a few blogroll-supporting feeds that have a <source:blogroll> element.
You can see an example in the feed for my blog.
If you have one, please post a link here or send me an email or in the GitHub thread.
Hopefully we have enough of them now to start a bootstrap. :-)
To get started I only need two or three, a few more would be nice to have.
Extra points if your blogroll links to another site that also has a blogroll.
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Okay just one more, then I have to sign off for the night. Back in the 80s I wrote a bulletin-board system that was based on ThinkTank, the outliner I did for VisiCorp, and then started Living Videotext with. It was the ThinkTank codebase, with a dialup interface, and a layer of UI (you couldn’t do an expand/collapse interface over a 300 baud modem line and an Apple II with 48K of usable app memory). It meant that threads were easy to write, because I had an outliner right there. I think it would be nice to have an outliner interface on a system like micro.blog which is, in many ways, like the BBS communities of the early 80s. Since we’re starting to use OPML again (something that makes me happy!) maybe we could work out some interfaces here. I have an open source outliner, and lots of good example code. An idea for future development perhaps.
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Okay one more post. I usually don’t start watching baseball until the basketball season is over. I’m very modal with my sports. But for some reason last night I tuned into the Mets game, in the last half of the 8th inning. When the inning started the Mets were up by two, by the end they were down by five! A complete meltdown. Errors, stupid mistakes, bad pitching, a total mess. The Mets were supposed to be good this year, but ever since they started spending money like the freaking Yankees, I’ve been somehwat conflicted, because I don’t mind that much if the Mets lose, but I can’t abide them becoming the YANKEES. Please. Anyway, I’m going to stay away from the Mets until July or whenever the Knicks are eliminated, and hope we can recover from my having tuned in early. Yes I am mystical about sports. It makes up for how analytic I have to be about software.
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I have the smoothest way imaginable to post to micro.blog, thanks to an innovation Manton did, while I was paying attention to fighting early fires in the release of Drummer a couple of years ago. Here’s a screen shot. I wish it was this easy for me to write for all the other platforms.
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With ActivityPub you know who’s following you and in RSS you don’t. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the user’s standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn’t like RSS btw.
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It's not just Meta
Manton responds to my post about his post about Facebook (some people call them Meta). I can never remember how to enter a comment over there, so I’ll post this on my micro.blog.
The thing is, it’s very difficult for any tech company to break out of the tech industry pattern, because people move between companies all the time. The board members, the ones from the industry come from tech companies, and many serve on boards of other tech companies.
I spent ten years in the system, and was for a while trying to start one of these companies. Eventually I sold out to one, and was on the board, and got a look inside. Later, as the web was starting up, first I tried to raise VC, but found the terms onerous, I also saw first-hand what they did to founders. It’s designed to produce one kind of output. One that piles up value and then sells it to the public. There have been later twists, but ultimately once you have the huge cash flow a company like Facebook has, and your shareholders have expectations of great returns, you basically have no choice. You have to run your company by the rules.
However! It is possible to get truly open ideas out there, and the ideas can survive. So let’s do more of that, and don’t depend on S
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Next steps in social blogrolls
The dust is settling on the rollout of the new blogroll on scripting.com.
I’m starting to work on next steps, learning how to host blogrolls for other people.
I have one set up for Manton, and I’m interested in doing the same for people with interesting blogrolls on micro.blog.
If you’d like to see your list rendered on blogroll.social, post a comment here with a link to your micro.blog site. I can take it from there.
I think this would be fun and memorable, and would help us all learn how this stuff works.
Thanks in advance!
Dave
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Welcome to the modern age of blogrolls
My blog once again has a blogroll.
I wanted to post about it here on micro.blog because it has basic compatibility with the stuff Manton rolled out a couple of days ago.
Once I’m confident the new stuff works on scripting.com, I’m going to get Manton’s site working in my world, so we can see what that looks like.
We’re back in the zone. A new mind bomb every day! :-)
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Rebooting the blogroll bootstrap
This is a cross-post of something I just wrote on my main blog. I wanted it to be in the flow here too.
Manton is doing great work.
His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.
We’ve been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.
That’s imho the best part.
PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.
PPS: I have to write a short “what is a blogroll” doc, re OPML and RSS. There’s not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.
PPPS: I’m having flashbacks to “Manila”. We’re using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.
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This is a cross-post of something I just wrote on my main blog. I wanted it to be in the flow here too.
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PPPS: I’m having flashbacks to “Manila”. We’re using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.
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PPS: I have to write a short “what is a blogroll” doc, re OPML and RSS. There’s not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.
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PS: Blogrolls are where the social web started.
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That’s imho the best part.
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We’ve been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.
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His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.
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Manton is doing great work.
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The new version of news.scripting.com is up. It’s been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it’s faster. And if you poke around you’ll find some new stuff. There’s an About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don’t doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄
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Random thought – maybe the fastest way to get full ActivityPub support for WordPress is to offer a feature in any WP site to cross-post to a Mastodon gateway operated by Automattic. It’s possible I don’t understand the problem of course. But Mastodon is open source, so it’s not like depending on another vendor to do this for you. And then you avoid all the hassles with having to say what part of the protocol is ActivityPub and what part is Mastodon’s API.
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What tool would you use to create and edit a blog roll?
Suppose I asked you to create a machine-readable blogroll.
For each blog you had to include a link to either:
its HTML home page with the assumption that the home page had a element pointing to the feed, or
a pointer to the feed, with the assumption that the top-level element points to the HTML home page.
You could include other data for each site, but those are minimal.
Think quickly – what tool would you use to create this data file/document?
If this tool isn’t ideal, what would be?
PS: Obviously you could do it with an outliner, I’m interested in hearing from people who don’t think in terms of outliners.
PPS: I also asked this question on GitHub, with a place to comment.
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Looking for bloggers, developers, reporters, columnists, who focus on new applications of AI. Please post a link here. If you have the URL for a feed, that would be best. Thanks!
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When you’re making the rounds of various Twitter-inspired systems, which do you go to first, which do you find the most interesting stuff on?
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