#indieweb 2020-09-24

2020-09-24 UTC
deltab, awolf, jeremycherfas, KempfCreative, jonnybarnes, marcusr, beko, seekr, avalos, VioletPixel, [schmarty], milkii, callMeBaby, KartikPrabhu, wagle and [Emma_Humphries] joined the channel
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Post Kinds 3.4.0 Released" https://david.shanske.com/2020/09/23/post-kinds-3-4-0-released/
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Zegnat aaronpk: random thought on rechecking, if one of the cases it domain ownership changes, would checking for WHOIS changes be a thing to do before deciding to repoll a site?
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petermolnar random thought: is anyone using Telegram, Discord, or something similar, to POSSE to?
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petermolnar Zegnat: most WHOIS lookups are dead by now, given the privacy shields
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Zegnat Not neccessarily a problem here, petermolnar. Because you are not interesting in actual ownership (no need to know which person owns what) just interested in changes?
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Zegnat But was just an errant thought I wanted to put down in writing when I saw the discussion above :)
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[James_Gallaghe] How many posts should I share on an RSS feed? Jekyll feed, by default, paginates a blog to 10 posts. Should my RSS feed show every post?
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "How I IndieWeb" https://jamesg.blog/2020/09/24/how-i-indieweb.html
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petermolnar I don't think that's a good idea, sharing every post.
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petermolnar that'll grow your RSS feed to an insane size
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Zegnat It is sort of a question of how often you post vs how often you think it is likely that people will poll your RSS feed.
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Zegnat If people use local RSS clients to read your blog, it might not be a weird case of them not polling for a couple days when their computer is off. So if you want them not to miss posts, you want to put a couple days worth of posts in the feed.
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[James_Gallaghe] I only extended the length because I wanted to send webmentions to all of the people who I have linked to in my past posts and I needed the whole feed to do so.
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[James_Gallaghe] I’ll reduce the number back to 10. I just wanted to make sure that RSS feeds would not lose out. I don’t consume RSS myself but I know that at least one person is subscribed to my feed.
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[Murray] The idea of limiting an RSS feed seems weird to me as a consumer. If I subscribe to a feed I expect to be able to go backwards through that feed all the way
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[Murray] you can add pagination to a feed to split it up, of course
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[James_Gallaghe] Well, I have 100 blog posts on my site and I try to post every day. I feel like sharing all of those in one file may swell up my RSS feed to the point where people may not subscribe.
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[Murray] In terms of a classical way of subscribing to RSS feeds that shouldn't matter (I don't know about modern indie readers). You subscribe, most readers will automatically mark any posts over x number or x number of days as read, and you just go from there
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[Murray] Depending on the kind of content, I'd also suggest thinking about splitting your feed into parts. I've seen a common pattern of an "everything" feed, one for articles, one for notes/bookmarks, one for interactions (likes, comments, etc.), that kind of thing. That way people subscribe to the bits they want
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petermolnar [Murray]: with a full-fat RSS feed, which contains the content as well, in my case, that would be a very large RSS file.
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[Murray] that said, looking around I may just be misunderstanding RSS, as I can't find any good endless feeds
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petermolnar limiting RSS is a reasonable behaviour
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[Murray] yep, the more I look into this the more I think my feed reader is probably filling in the functionality I expect itself. I can see, for example, that adactio limits his feeds to 10 items, yet if I subscribe via my reader I get access to the full archive 🤷‍♂️ so I'd just ignore me [James_Gallaghe] 😂
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[James_Gallaghe] My feed contains the content of my articles too petermolnar. I think I’ll stick with ten posts for now.
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[James_Gallaghe] Nobody has complained about the current setup 🙂
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Zegnat Most feed readers will keep posts cached in themselves. Which is why I said you can make feeds shorter, what you are aiming for is to have all the content the feed reader missed between polls in the feed.
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Zegnat So if you know all readers fetch your feed every 24 hours, you really only need to keep posts of the last 24 hours in the feed file.
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petermolnar adactio has 17231 posts on his site, according to the numbers on the front page. That would make a humongous XML.
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Zegnat Of course in reality it is hard to say when readers come by to refresh your feed. So I would stick to a couple of days to a week of content.
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Zegnat But I would limit the feed size by time, not by number of entries. That might just be me trying to accomodate reader software too much though
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Zegnat (Starting to veer into #indieweb-dev territory maybe.)
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petermolnar yes
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sebbu yeah, RSS feeds that only contains title and just the first (or first two) sentences of the posts are USELESS
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aaronpk Zegnat: looking for whois changes seems like a good signal. Also maybe DNS changes, at least nameserver changes. But still that's something to poll on some sort of schedule, it's debatable whether that's cheaper to check than to just check the actual content
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[Murray] sebbu: that really depends on how you use RSS. I actually prefer those types of feed (which is why mine is like that) because I prefer to be able to scan through a feed reader quickly, and would rather read something on the website it came from
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sebbu [Murray], i use[d] as a way to aggregates news feed, to read them in a centralised thing (app or website, doesn't matter)
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sebbu so if i need to open a browser and click on every news, it becomes useless
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[Murray] I understand that, I'm just saying there are different use cases and different sites will prioritise them in different ways 🙂 neither is right or wrong, and I guess you could offer "full fat" and "skinny" feeds for people to choose from if you wanted to support both
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sebbu well, the skinny feeds is usually for putting it as a blogroll or something in your menu column ;)
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sebbu better to list the 5 last news that just linking someone's else blog
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[Murray] I've noticed a lot of people I subscribe to who have switched off full content feeds, because they want you to read it on their site. Sometimes for advertising reasons, sometimes because the UX is more tailored, and sometimes because it contains content that simply can't be delivered via RSS
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[James_Gallaghe] My concern with offering two feeds is that visitors may get confused. If I have a slim and a full feed, visitors will have to make a decision between which one to use. Visitors may not even know that I have two feeds if I don’t do a good enough job of promoting them.
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[Murray] That's valid and the reason I don't do that myself 🙂 though I think a /feeds page could help in that regard (and, ultimately, I do still have several feeds for various content types, which is something I find really useful on other sites(
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[snarfed] re RSS feed paging, obligatory, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005
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[snarfed] oh but that’s also probably a cue for us to => #indieweb-dev
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[jgmac1106] I offer so many feeds on my homepage and people really like it, they can just follow poetry, bookmarks (just not my main feed as I keep screwing it up) irony
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[jgmac1106] But in the education blogging world runs on WP so everyone just uses categories, that is an interesting balance
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[jgmac1106] main feed on your homepage but if you see an article with a category or tag you can click on it and follow that feed
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[jgmac1106] Almost all syndicated classroom spaces usually have directions on how to find and add your category feed (teaching users this IS the biggest pain point though..after what is the actual url of a post)
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[jgmac1106] I am also lazy and let granary build all my rss feeds for me to later break as I mess with how I want articles organized. I may stop worrying about it and just do last three articles on my homepage
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[jgmac1106] Is that what people mean when they say routing? like the url structure and where the file saves I actually had a site that automated these things?
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jacky kinda, yeah
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[jgmac1106] What is routing?
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Loqi routing (or URL routing) is a way to configure a website to have some (or all) of its URLs handled by software rather than static files; an IndieWeb site may have no routing (a static site), some routing like one directory handled by PHP or other software, or all URLs handled by a framework like Ruby on Rails with its own routing system https://indieweb.org/routing
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[jgmac1106] thx jacky, I keep messing with year and date and it just gets worse since I don't know anything...I think last three articles would work
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[jgmac1106] ...wait then people would have to leave their reader then...
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[jgmac1106] chrisaldrich has 13,456 feeds on his website....it can get to a point where it overwhelms readers too and they timeout
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mayakate[m] For me I've struggled with what division is sensible. I had thought that I wanted to separate out content "about" some link from content not spurred by any other page, but that is seeming less useful to me. There probably aren't any good one-size-fits-all solutions because it's about knowing what clusters of stuff you put up and what clusters your readers care about.
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jamietanna I've had comments from folks using feed readers that my site breaks their reader because the feed is too large (as it included all post types, at the time, as well as the full content of posts)
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[James_Gallaghe] Interesting.
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[chrisaldrich] I have maybe only about 250 "worthwhile" feeds on my site at the moment though in practice there are around 7,000 discrete feeds (generated by WordPress) not counting the potential combinations of each of those. Many of the 7,000 are generated from tags, some of which may only have 1 or 2 posts each.
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[chrisaldrich] I've just crossed the 25,000 posts threshold this week, so at least I have fewer feeds than posts. 🙂
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[chrisaldrich] On average I'm posting between 10 and 50 things a day, so tend to keep the number of posts in my feeds at about 40 so that those subscribing to the "firehose" and only checking once a day shouldn't miss too much.
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[chrisaldrich] For people subscribing to some of the edge-case tag feeds, I usually worry that they may miss out on material if I subsequently change that taxonomy or switch to something tangential. I suppose it's like following rarely used hashtags on other platforms though....
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[chrisaldrich] The biggest quirk in my feeds, I think, is the expectation around the taxonomy "IndieWeb" where I've taken to using the category feed https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/ to indicate primarily original posts/content that I make versus the tag feed https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/ which are now entirely "smaller" posts and interactions with other people writing about the topic or bookmarks of IndieWeb related content from
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[chrisaldrich] others' sites.
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[chrisaldrich] My hope is that if you're following that same topic on others' sites, you won't see as much duplication...
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