rss

The trip to the movie store was a ritual in itself. It was an event. There was a deliberateness in browsing the new release wall and picking up the movie boxes to read the case. Independent films were tucked in between the big blockbusters, but they were available and visible. Next would be the wander between rows of the old movies. A leisurely browse to see if anything else caught your eye from a time long past.

Stephanie Stimac recounts what it was like going to the store to pick out a movie. The experience was one centered around discovery and deliberate choices. The remainder of the post picks at this topic some more and how it differs from the platforms we have readily available to use today.

However, it got me thinking about my reading habits. I've own, and still occasionally use, a Kindle but it isn't my primary method of reading. The experience of finding and visiting a physical book store, especially used ones, to look for books is much more enjoyable than browsing a virtual catalogue. Sure, it's nice to have that one book that I really want to read at hand, that's what the Kindle is for, but I wouldn't trade it for the stores or libraries. In fact, when traveling my wife and I try to visit local book stores where possible.

The same could be said about my RSS feed, the only caveat being it's already curated. It's nice having articles to pick from and read without being recommended what's best by the algorithm. With subscriptions here in try to be diverse in the feeds I add but also prune it from time to time otherwise it gets out of hand.

Leonid Shevtsov shares a script that runs through the developer console that converts your YouTube scriptions into an OPML file. While I don't make a habbit of copying code straight into the developer console, it's short enough to verify everything looks good before proceeding. I discovered this through Giles Turnbull.

I built a similar tool that's able to give you RSS feeds from a channel, video, or as I recently found out playlists.

If you only publish your podcast to Spotify, make sure to enable RSS and distribute!

The fact that it offers free, unlimited podcast hosting is a major differentiator for Spotify. [...] Spotify uses dark patterns to make it difficult to distribute podcasts hosted on its platform to rival apps.

Spotify’s documentation has an article about distribution, with detailed instructions for each platform.

TIL YouTube playlists have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, just like channels. For every new video that gets added, a new entry pops up in the RSS feed.

I learned this thanks to @Zegnat, who added a feature to YT-RSS allowing you to retrieve the feed URL of YouTube playlists (among some other backend code improvements)!

Related toot

Blindly subscribing to entire blog rolls can lead to an overwhelming amount of posts to sift through. Instead, David Oliver shares their approach to curating RSS content.

We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.

The post goes on to talking about taking care of it like you would a garden. There's something about the indie web and gardening metaphors.

Discovered via 82MHz.

Tom Usher provides some steps to curate your feeds and break away from algorithmic complacency.

To readers of my blog, it's no surprise, I like RSS. In this post, Mark Nottingham describes what RSS lacks to thrive on today's web this, includes the ability for publishers to be able to track readership, control/ensure readability in various readers, introduce methods of authenticating feeds, and more. Mark has also set up an IETF mailing list to discuss this further. This was discovered through Evan.

Robb Knight has created a tool, Lens, to help check meta tags on websites. There are many similar tools out there but this gives just the right parameters I need along with a card preview and code samples to use. Robb's write-up covers this in more detail.