We still need a way to explore and resurface old blog posts

Six years ago I wrote about browsing the blog blacklist and the need to resurface content from old blog postings. Today, even in the supposed twilight of blogs [1], I was again reminded how much we need a tool for excavation of old posts. I can think of at least one way do it (standard metadata for blog history, random selection of past posts based on internal and external inbound links) but there are probably several.

Maybe something for a future blog renaissance to tackle. Or if Feedbin is looking for a new feature set …

- fn -

[1] On the one hand I accept that RSS and blogs are vanishing, on the other my Feedbin stream is a rich and engrossing as ever, covering hundreds of sources.

NYT moves columnist blogs into a controlled venue -- with some deprecated RSS

The NYT has moved Krugman’s blog to a new platform. I presume this is true for all their journalists. The NYT RSS index still points to his now frozen blog at nytimes.com/blogs/krugman. 

So what’s the new platform?

K wrote that posts will show up on his regular columnist page: nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman. That page has an RSS feed. Of course, as is the norm these days, the page does not indicate the feed exists. It has an odd structure

www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman/rss.xml

When I added the feed to Feedbin it displayed in a strange sequence — without the publication date. So the source RSS may be malformed. It’s possible the NYT will fix this.

I note that the footer for the post from 12/9/2017 still points to his old blog “The Conscience of a Liberal”. 

It looks like the NYT is sort-of keeping it’s RSS feeds around, but the transition is at least a bit messy. I can’t tell how one distinguishes K blog posts from his “print” articles, they seem to share one stream. That has to make his writing more formal and more controlled. Which is perhaps the point. 

I am reminded again of an unfortunate side-effect of the ad-funded internet. “Free” media streams now target the easily manipulated populations, typically to serve causes of the corporate and wealthy, often to persuade  the credulous to act against their own interests. They are essentially parasitic. Pay streams can be excellent, but they are only accessible to a small minority.

A change to my publishing streams

These are the last days of app.net. It ends in 3 days. App.net has been good to me. Great tools, smart and interesting people, RSS integration (albeit grudgingly at first) and the best communication/conversation platform I’ve worked with. App.net was what Twitter should have been. It has made clear how badly Twitter has failed.

These are, surprisingly, also the end times for Maciej’s Pinboard as a publishing platform. I have 33,236 pins there, and something is broken. Neither pinner.app or pushpin.app are able to connect and download the streams. From what Maciej has written in the past I may have passed some throttling limit. I’m using Pinboard in ways he did not intend — and the iOS apps don’t scale either. 

So I need to make some changes. Gordon’s Notes and Tech will stay on Blogger for now — it’s been surprisingly robust and trouble free for many years. It helps that there’s an exit strategy to WordPress if Google kills it, but as best I can tell Google is going to keep Blogger limping along.

My DreamHost wordpress microblog has mirrored my pinboard stream for years. I’m going to see if there’s a way to make it a true microblog publishing platform. I’m not sure how to do that, in particular it’s not obvious how I can conveniently post via Reeder.app. It will take me a while to work that out.

In the meantime there are several app.net spinoffs in the work. I’m tracking several of these as much as my time allows - especially pnut.io (@jgordon) and 10centuries (@jgordon). March 2017 is a heck of a month for me so things have gone slowly.

Uncertain times! For now if you follow kateva.org/sh you’ll see what I’m up to, no matter how the process evolves.

Revenge of RSS: Google returns to blogs and feeds.

Remember when Google killed Google Reader Shares? October 31, 2011. RSS had been ailing for years by then. Google Reader shut down a couple of years later, by June of 2013 I’d settled on my still current favorite - Feedbin.

Google killed Google Reader in favor of the horribly named G+ (did they learn nothing from Prince’s glyph?). G+ and its proprietary subscription/notification protocol lasted about two years. Twitter dropped its RSS support. Now Twitter is dying. Only Facebook was able to make a proprietary subscription-notification system work. Quietly Google’s core blogs continued to operate in the background.

Today Google fully returned to the RSS blog. Yes, that little box in the top right says “RSS Feed” (not, incidentally, “Atom” feed).

I’m looking forward to seeing their new feed reader.

See also:

• Gordon’s Tech: Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed: from the heyday of the feed reader

Google and RSS: Not unfolding as anticipated

Google Reader died just 3 years ago. It feels a lot longer, I’m probably thinking of when Google burned Reader Social in favor of their G+ initiative. That was 5 years ago; eons by our reckoning, but things have changed less than we expected.

2013 was a truly bad year, but then Google ran into some G+ problems. Namely we hated it. They’ve since cut G+ into pieces, burned each piece, and scattered the ashes deep beneath the continental plates.

Meanwhile, despite a Feed 101 page that’s unchanged since 2004, Google’s Feedburner still lives. Google’s ancient Blogger Buzz blog is active, indeed blogs continue to be Google’s primary way of talking to the world.

Consider Google Fiber — one of their most critical projects. Today’s public housing announcement has a blogspot.com URL. More — take a look at the sidebar:

 

Ok, so it still has the obsolete G+ link, and Twitter and Facebook get colorful links, but note the old “Feed” link. Still there.

That’s not what we expected three years ago.

There’s more. Gmail has 1 billion active accounts. That’s big, but Google wants to replace it with Inbox. So Inbox is a good guide to Google’s current thinking. Inbox has an RSS (Atom) Feed.

RSS survived the great fire of 2013, Media gurus are shocked to learn that RSS still rules the news. RSS is still the only standard for two essential net functions: notification and subscription. RSS is going to last (Feedbin and Reeder.app are my personal clients).

I wonder when Google will incorporate Feed subscription into Inbox.

See also: 

• Quick thoughts on the end of Google Reader 3/2013
• Dapocalypse now: Google’s day of infamy 10/2011 
• Scorched Earth - if Google can’t own the web then it must destroy it. 5/2013
• Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear 5/2014. Still same mix.
• Blogging is definitively back - the NYT has redone their Zombie RSS page 10/2014. NYT RSS continues to be primary way I use my subscription.
• Google and the Net 2015: The Quick, the Sick and the Dead - 7th edition 2/2015. Since then G+ was knifed and many Dead products have moved up to merely Sick.
• The Net is a forest. It has fires. 4/2013. In retrospect 2013 was a particularly bad year for the Net.
• Google’s war on standards: RSS, ActiveSync, now CalDAV. 3/2013. Apple deserves blame for CalDAV illness too.
• Project Ducky - why I’ve stopped using new Cloud services. 3/2013. I’ve been very careful since to only use services with low switching costs. Happy with how that’s worked.
• Google and Facebook: how Chrome supports life with an dully evil corporation 2/2012. Google turned Evil in 2011. They’ve been in rehab over the past year or so. Curiously no tech vendor is particularly Evil these days; even Facebook is respectable. Amazon and Google are probably still contending for “most Evil”, with Microsoft “most Good”. Apple and Facebook somewhere in the middle.

Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome are all very different.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

No, Apple News.app is not necessarily evil. Why do you ask?

[When first wrote this I chose an article, that, by chance, didn’t have a redirect to the original site. Which means I got things a wee bit wrong. Sirshannon gently corrected me. So now a bit of a rewrite …]

Viewing what I thought was a NYT article in News.app (turns out to be an Apple article that showed up on NYT page, which is kind of interesting) I can use Pinner.app 4.0 to create a Pinboard: Bookmark. That bookmark includes a URL like this:

https://apple.news/ABLDsKpUXSOafJmAr1FFtNg

From Pinboard app.net pourover and IFTTT (still around) share that link and my comment to app.net, twitter and my kateva.org/sh personal archive.

So far, so open. But what happens next?

If you access the particular link on an iOS device Apple launches News.app and you can view it there — both Safari.app and Chrome.app do the same thing.

If you access the link anywhere else you get this:

However, that’s not the end of the story (thought I thought it was). This link, opened in a web browser, redirects to a web page:

https://alpha.app.net/sirshannon/post/65149315#65148990

Apple does not redirect to the web version of the article. With NYT and other sources I chose one can open the News page in Safari.

This isn’t is surprising for two reasons. The first is that, even more than Google, Apple is all about Roach Motel class lock-in. The second is that, unlike the RSS of old, News.app has a viable ad-funded business model. Links to the open (perennially dying) web don’t fit that model.

So, despite my dire expectations, Apple, for now, is providing redirects to the web source. This doesn’t mean Apple will never interfere with the distribution of information that would hurt Apple’s business or offend its executives, and my confusion between NYT and Apple content is a bit weird (user error?), but for now News.app isn’t necessarily evil. I’ll be staying with Reeder and the lost mist-enshrouded all but forgotten Shangri La of RSS, Feedbin and Reeder until the last link dies  I’ll be experimenting with sharing News.app articles from it via RSS, Feedbin and Reeder ...

Facebook's feed overflow fix will have collateral damage

Facebook, the everyman feed reader, has an “attention economy” problem that’s familiar to anyone who has used industrial feed readers like Feedbin or Reeder.app (emphases mine):

Facebook Will Curtail Unpaid Ads by Brands - Vindu Goel NYTimes.com

…So many posts, videos and images are being published on Facebook that the average user has about 1,500 new items they could see when they log on. Some people have as many as 15,000, the company says.

Over the last two years, the social network has repeatedly tweaked the system to show the top 300 or so items that it predicts each person will want to read. Facebook argues that people prefer to see videos, photos, news articles and updates from their friends and family more than from brands. So over time, posts by businesses have shown up less frequently….

The problem is Facebook users liberally “Like” all kinds of post sources - Pages (businesses, orbs), Friends, and Groups. Their Feeds overflow.

My son is up to several hundred sources, and they each generate a few posts a day. I’m sure he’s far behind the stream — if his timeline showed “most recent” he’d never see anything from Friends or Family.

Of course users could turn off the pages they don’t want, but, really, they kind of like them. The problem is compounded by Facebook’s UI; unlike an industrial Feed Reader (Feedbin, Feedly, etc) it’s not designed for managing large volume post streams.

So users are drowning in posts, most of which they kind of like, but they’re not seeing the things they really like — like the grand-dogs new teeth or the niece’s haircut.

At the same time Facebook is watching ad revenue go missing. Users dislike Facebook’s ads, but they like news posts from their favorite bookstore — and the bookstore’s paying nothing (or used to, anyway).

That problem is getting fixed …

… the company told marketers that if they wanted to reach customers on Facebook, they needed to buy an ad.

…  fewer fans of a retailer will see its notice about a big sale and fewer fans of a video game company will see a post promoting its latest app.

Even posts from big advertisers that spend millions of dollars on Facebook ads will vanish from the news feeds of their fans unless they turn them into ads…

Seems reasonable. I know how to tweak my Facebook stream to see what I like — but I’m a geek. Civilians aren’t going to do that. So the “fix” doesn’t seem too bad — unless you know something Mr. Goel doesn’t know. Unless you know that not all Facebook Pages are businesses or “brands”.

For example, these are 6 Pages I administer:

Looking at my own Pages Feed I see a novelist friend, the Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota, Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition, Keweenaw Trails, Cyclocarbon, Avalon Charter School, CrossFit St Paul, Minocqua Winter Park, Autistic License Play, Lebanon Hills Mountain Bike Trail, City of St Paul _ Government, Skate the Oval and a bunch more like that. A couple are businesses, but mostly it’s non-profits and local government.

All of these are at risk - and the trend is already underway. Here are some recent stats from our special hockey team page - a page with 81 “Likes” (Subscribers):

 

The most recent post was seen by 15 of those 81. That number is going to fall even further — unless I pay for the posts to be seen (I won’t).

Facebook has a real problem — but their Feed Overflow Fix is going to cause a lot of collateral damage. 

One approach for organizations and nonprofits would be to convert Pages to Groups - except we don’t know how Facebook is going to treat posts from Groups. Maybe they’ll want Groups to Pay to Play too.

For my part I’ll delete most of these Pages, and I’ll move back to email and to blogs. The transition is easier because so many of the people I want to reach have left Facebook (perhaps because of the Feed Overflow problem).

It’s not all bad news. Facebook’s policy might move non-profits and local government back to open-standards blogs - eventually.

Annals of return to RSS - Geeks who don't realize their site has a feed

RSS, left for dead years ago, has crawled back out of the wilderness. Today we welcome our latest Prodigal - Jon Udell.

There's still work to be done though. Consider Data Elixir, data sciences site based on the "Curated" email platform. True, big data isn't cutting edge any more, but this is still a relatively modern site. So modern it supports two ways to subscribe - Email and "Safari Push Notifications".

No RSS.

Except, of course, the site does have an RSS feed. Works fine. As best I can tell the authors have no idea it exists.

This will take a while...