👓 The Case for RSS | MacSparky

The Case for RSS by David Sparks (MacSparky)
If you are thinking about using RSS, I have a little advice. Be wary feed inflation. RSS is so easy to implement that it's a slippery slope between having RSS feeds for just a few websites and instead of having RSS feeds for hundreds of websites. If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose of using RSS. The trick to using RSS is to be brutal with your subscriptions. I think the key is looking for websites with high signal and low noise. Sites that publish one or two articles a day (or even one to two articles a week) but make them good articles are much more valuable and RSS feed than sites that published 30 articles a day.
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👓 Building Digital Workflows by Aaron Davis

Building Digital Workflows by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
Whether it is how we write or stay organised, technology is always adapting and evolving. Here are a few of the recent changes to my digital workflows.

An interesting philosophy of regularly changing workflows. I’ve done this for a long time, but never really given it a name.

There’s a nice tip about the Listen functionality in Pocket which I hadn’t yet heard about. I’m also curious how they’ve implemented highlighting and what I might do with it.

I suspect that if Aaron hasn’t come across Huffduffer as a tool yet (with a bookmarklet), he’ll appreciate it for both discovery as well as having his own audio feed to push to his mobile player.

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👓 ‘How dare they’: Nutella changes recipe, sending its fans to the edge | Washington Post

‘How dare they’: Nutella changes recipe, sending its fans to the edge by Travis M. Andrews (Washington Post)
A legion of snackers live for the hazelnut spread. And they're not happy.

Some interesting food history here that I didn’t know about.

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👓 Journalists Boycott Disney Films After L.A. Times Snub | Hollywood Reporter

Journalists Boycott Disney Films After L.A. Times Snub by Jeremy Barr (The Hollywood Reporter)
The L.A. Times is currently barred from attending advance screenings of Disney movies.

I’m betting this doesn’t end well for Disney’s corporate image. How shortsighted can they be?

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👓 Something is wrong on the internet by James Bridle | Medium

Something is wrong on the internet by James Bridle (Medium)
What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.

This may be one of the must read articles of the year. It describes just a small microcosm of what is happening on the internet that needs to be fixed. It seems innocuous, but it’s long term effects will be painful.

I think this fits the definition of a Weapon of Math Destruction.

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👓 Woman Fired For Flipping Off Trump’s Motorcade | Huffington Post

Woman Fired For Flipping Off Trump's Motorcade by Jennifer Bendery (HuffPost)
A photo of Juli Briskman giving the middle finger to the president went viral. Her employer was not pleased.

The note about the fellow male worker not being treated equally when his overstep actually featured his employer is a bit infuriating. The worst part is that their action brought new fire to the story and they Barbara Streisand-ed themselves at the same time.

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👓 Here’s my blogroll by Khürt Williams

Here’s my blogroll by Khürt WilliamsKhürt Williams (Island in the Net)
Aperture—ƒ/5 Credit—Khürt L. Williams Camera—NIKON D5100 Taken—25 July, 2014 Focal length—85mm ISO—100 Shutter speed—1/400s I have a little over 100 RSS feeds in my Feedbin account. They covers a diverse set of topics around photography, Formula 1 racing, beer, diabetes, philosophy,...

Some interesting sources here, some of which I’m already following. Will have to sample some of the photography resources.

 

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👓 Do Things that Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

This is a slightly older post, but still has some generally sound advice for start up companies.

As I read it, I can’t help but think about how the structure and set up of the IndieWeb community is mirrored in a lot of this advice. The fact that everyone is diligently selfdogfooding the ultimate product that we all love and are designing specifically for people gives me great hope that we’re all onto something that has great potential.

I’m curious how we can take the rest of the playbook and put it into action as well. This is certainly something I’ll have to come back and think about more in the near future.

Big portions of the article also skirt around the idea of tummeling without actually using the term. It such a useful concept, I’m surprised that it’s not more commonly known.

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👓 Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says | Bloomberg

Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says by Selina Wang (Bloomberg.com)
In 2015, a manager discovered a trove of accounts with Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses

The Russian part and the election part completely aside, having product security subservient to growth is completely the wrong way to build any product.

 

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👓 Storiad Gives Indie Authors a Fighting Chance | Pasadena Independent

Storiad Gives Indie Authors a Fighting Chance by Emily G. Peters (Pasadena Independent)
Founded by Ramzi Hajj and Nathan Tyler, Storiad technology helps independent authors and publishers manage bookselling campaigns and boost book sales.

Go Ramzi!

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🎧 NaNoWriMo Superhero on Medium: Ben Werdmuller | National Novel Writing Month – Medium

NaNoWriMo Superhero on Medium: Ben Werdmuller by Julie Russell from National Novel Writing Month – Medium
Welcome to the second episode of NaNoWriMo Superheroes and Superheroines on Medium. Throughout the month of November we’ll interview people with different backgrounds, day jobs, and involvement with this annual writing event. All of our superheroes and superheroines have one thing in common — they accepted the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel first draft in the month of November.

Ben Werdmuller, gets the #NaNoWriMo quote of the month as he talks about the user interface in common text editors:

Every single one of those buttons is a distraction button.

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📖 Read pages 90-171 of Origin by Dan Brown

📖 Read pages 90-171 of Origin: A Novel by Dan Brown

I was just shy of that first “punch” when I quit reading the other day. It came  and we’re now off to the races. This somehow feels a bit “fluffier” than the typical Langdon novel though. It feels like there’s a lot of discussion for those who don’t understand the religion, science, and technology, but at least he does it in a way that doesn’t feel too on-the-nose. I still feel a bit disconnected from the characters here compared to his prior efforts.

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👓 Content, bloat, privacy, archives | Peter Molnar

Content, bloat, privacy, archives by Peter MolnarPeter Molnar (petermolnar.net)
I spent a lot of time trying centralising my online activities, including adding bookmarks and imports from social networks. Lately my site looked bloated and unmaintainable. I started questioning what data is my data, what data should or could I own - it was time to rethink some ideas.

Peter has some solid thoughts here on some subtle uses of things including likes, favorites, and bookmarks. I particularly like the way he separates out and describes the “vote” intent of likes on various platforms.

Somewhat like him, I’m bookmarking things I’d like to read privately on the back end of my site, and then only selectively posting them as read posts when I’ve done that. Archiving them to the Internet Archive has been useful for cutting down on the data I’m keeping, but saving them does allow me to browse through my commonplace book frequently when I need to find something and couldn’t find it otherwise.

Some of this reminds me of the way I use the “star” functionality on Twitter (I still think of it as a star and not a heart). I don’t typically use it to mean anything in particular on Twitter itself. Instead I’m using that functionality in conjunction with an IFTTT recipe to bookmark things I’d like to read later. So in a larger sense, I’m using Twitter as a headline feed reader and marking all the things I’d like to come back and read at a later time.

Once in a blue moon, during a chat with others on Twitter, I may use the heart as an indicator to the other party that I’ve seen/read their post, particularly when I don’t intend to reply to the last in a chain of conversation. This type of ephemera or digital exhaust generally isn’t something I find useful for keeping in the long term, so like Peter I typically don’t keep/archive them on my site.

For those who haven’t read them yet, Sebastiaan Andewe has a recent article covering similar ground: Thinking about bookmarks and likes on the IndieWeb.

I find these discussions useful for thinking through what I’m doing on my own site and refining how I use it as well.​​​​

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