<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> is fine, but I feel like there should be a standard for a site, not a page, to share a “list of
feeds associated with a site”.
Last night, I dreamed about a way to achieve that: ./well-known/feeds as an OPML document. Here’s mine, and here’s a draft spec.
Interested to hear what Dave Winer thinks…
I do not claim to have a good explanation nor excuse. See also this terrible idea from 21 years ago.
This checkin to GC3D6J8 The Leap Year Club reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Enjoyed solving this puzzle, although possibly not 100% in the way the author intended (I spotted some mathematical quirks that gave me a shortcut/cut down the number of possibilities for matching first and surnames!). Now I just need to find an excuse to get over to the GZ and find it! (No idea how soon that’ll be, though!)
Solving this puzzle cache was inspired by a conversation on the Geoleaks forum.
This checkin to GC7Z2J6 Pinsley Wood by Olivia and Jessica reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
No luck here this morning for the geopup and I. The undergrowth has come through incredibly thick your summer, and we had to work hard to hunt in likely locations. (The hint didn’t help much, as it wasn’t entirely clear which direction it assumed we were coming from, but the GPSr good looked good so I figure we were on the right spot.) Strangely, we did find a bauble (pictured) – did somebody decorate these woods for Christmas, I wonder?
This checkin to GC5J1PP Badger's First Sett reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Easy find while out on a dog walk. Not been out this side of the wood before! Might have struggled to find the GZ were it not for the remnants of a “geo trail” through the dense undergrowth, which was thick enough that the pooch’s little legs couldn’t take her the last 5 metres and I had to press on alone. Soon, though, the cache was in hand and I was able to return to my four-legged furry friend and continue on our way. TFTC!
This checkin to GC340EG Leslie reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I find myself in Cropredy but once a year, at most, and for the obvious reason. The festival atmosphere, not to mention the hordes of revellers, does not in general bode well for a successful geocaching expedition! But I’ve persisted, mostly by virtue of being an early riser than most of the partygoers and inclined towards a swift morning constitutional (as mentioned here), and I’ve gradually picked off each of the local caches bar this one and a multi that’s somewhat incompatible with the festival.
This time last year I came very near to this GZ while hunting for GC9GK2V “Mr Impossible”, but it was coming close to the time I anticipated that the kids would wake up and demand breakfast, so I turned around before reaching “Leslie”. This year I’ve pressed directly on to this cache, thankful for the cool damp air through which my brisk walk took me compared to last year’s saunalike heat.
As others have noted, the cache container has seen better days but it’s still just about holding together (insert your own joke about aging folk rockers here). Regardless, a delightful morning walk before a day of music. SL, TFTC.
This checkin to GC340FP Sanders reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I managed to log most of the local geocaches during last year’s Fairport by getting up early each morning (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), while the other revellers were still nursing their hangovers, but I wasn’t able to retrieve this muddle-laden one. This year I had better luck and the kids, dog and I soon had it in hand. SL, TNLN, TFTC!
In his latest Last Month video, TomSka took the “is a hot dog a sandwich” argument into a whole new arena by saying:
I’m a firm believer that the sauce and toppings should go under the dog. And that way, I don’t have to put it all in my moustache when I eat it.
My initial reaction was: What the hell are you doing‽ They’re toppings, not… bottomings, I guess?
But on the other hand:
So yeah, I might try doing this. But if I do, I’m definitely going to start calling them “bottomings”.
Proud to say that danq.me is the newest site to be admitted into Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. Let’s keep the web lean!
The week before last, Katie shared with me that article from last month, Who killed Google Reader? I’d read it before so I didn’t bother clicking through again, but we did end up chatting about RSS a bit1.
Katie “abandoned feeds a few years ago” because they were “regularly ending up with 200+ unread items that felt overwhelming”.
Conversely: I think that dropping your feed reader because there’s too much to read is… solving the wrong problem.
Dave Rupert last week wrote about his feed reader’s “unread” count having grown to a mammoth 2,000+ items, and his plan to reduce that.
I think that he, like Katie, might be looking at his reader in a different way than I do mine.
I’ve been in the position that Katie and David describe: of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unread items. And I know others have, too. So let me share something I’ve learned sooner:
There’s nothing special about reaching Inbox Zero in your feed reader.
It’s not noble nor enlightened to get to the bottom of your “unread” list.
Your 👏 feed 👏 reader 👏 is 👏 not 👏 an 👏 email 👏 client. 👏
The idea of Inbox Zero as applied to your email inbox is about productivity. Any message in your email might be something that requires urgent action, and you won’t know until you filter through and categorise .
But your RSS reader doesn’t (shouldn’t?) be there to add to your to-do list. Your RSS reader is a list of things you might like to read. In an ideal world, reaching “RSS Zero” would mean that you’ve seen everything on the Internet that you might enjoy. That’s not enlightened; that’s sad!
My RSS reader is a place of joy, never of stress. I’ve tried to boil down the principles that makes it so, and here they are:
And if you’d like to put those tips in your RSS reader to digest later or at your own pace, you can: 
here’s an RSS feed containing (only) these RSS tips!
1 You’d be forgiven for thinking that RSS was my favourite topic, given that so-far-this-year I’ve written about improving WordPress’s feeds, about mathematical quirks in FreshRSS, on using XPath scraping as an RSS alternative (twice), and the joy of getting notified when a vlog channel is ressurected (thanks to RSS). I swear I have other interests.
2 If your feed reader doesn’t support any kind of grouping, get a better reader.
3 If your feed reader doesn’t support any kind of marking/favouriting/tagging of articles, get a better reader.
4 If your feed reader doesn’t support customisable expiry times… well that’s not too unusual, but you might want to consider getting a better reader.
5 FreshRSS calls the feature that fetches actual post content from the resulting page “Article CSS selector on original website”, which is a bit of a mouthful, but you can see what it’s doing. If your feed reader doesn’t support fetching full content… well, it’s probably not that big a deal, but it’s a good nice-to-have if you’re shopping around for a reader, in my opinion.
6 There’s so much choice in feed readers, and migrating between them is (usually) very easy, so everybody can find the best choice for them. Feedly, Inoreader, and The Old Reader are popular, free, and easy-to-use if you’re looking to get started. I prefer a selfhosted tool so I use the amazing FreshRSS (having migrated from Tiny Tiny RSS). Here’s some more tips on getting started. You might prefer a desktop or mobile tool, or even something exotic: part of the beauty of RSS feeds is they’re open and interoperable, so if for example you love using Slack, you can use Slack to push feed updates to you and get almost all the features you need to do everything in my list, including grouping (using channels) and saving for later (using Slackbot/”remind me about this”). Slack’s a perfectly acceptable feed reader for some people!
I’ve made a handful of tweaks to my RSS feed which I feel improves upon WordPress’s default implementation, at least in my use-case.1 In case any of these improvements help you, too, here’s a list of them:
Since 2020, I’ve decorated post titles by prefixing them with the “kind” of post they are (courtesy of the Post Kinds plugin). I’ve already written about how I do it, if you’re interested.
A minority of my posts are – initially, at least – publicised only via my RSS feed (and places that are directly fed by it, like email subscribers). I use a tag to identify posts to be hidden in this way. I’ve written about my implementation before, but I’ve since made a couple of additional improvements:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow HTTP header when viewing such tag or a post, to discourage
search engines (code for this not shown below because it’s so very specific to my theme that it’s probably no use to anybody else!).
// 1. Suppress the "rss club" tag from tag clouds/the full tag list function rss_club_suppress_tags_from_display( string $tag_list, string $before, string $sep, string $after, int $post_id ): string { foreach(['rss-club'] as $tag_to_suppress){ $regex = sprintf( '/<li>[^<]*?<a [^>]*?href="[^"]*?\/%s\/"[^>]*?>.*?<\/a>[^<]*?<\/li>/', $tag_to_suppress ); $tag_list = preg_replace( $regex, '', $tag_list ); } return $tag_list; } add_filter( 'the_tags', 'rss_club_suppress_tags_from_display', 10, 5 ); // 2. In feeds, tweak title if it's an RSS exclusive function rss_club_add_rss_only_to_rss_post_title( $title ){ $post_tag_slugs = array_map(function($tag){ return $tag->slug; }, wp_get_post_tags( get_the_ID() )); if ( ! in_array( 'rss-club', $post_tag_slugs ) ) return $title; // if we don't have an rss-club tag, drop out here return trim( "{$title} [RSS Exclusive!]" ); return $title; } add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'rss_club_add_rss_only_to_rss_post_title', 6 );
Adding a stylesheet to your feeds can make them much friendlier to beginner users (which helps drive adoption) without making them much less-convenient for people who know how to use feeds already. Darek Kay and Terence Eden both wrote great articles about this just earlier this year, but I think my implementation goes a step further.
In addition to adding some “Q” branding, I made tweaks to make it work seamlessly with both my RSS and Atom feeds by using
two <xsl:for-each> blocks and exploiting the fact that the two standards don’t overlap in their root namespaces. Here’s my full XSLT; you need to
override your feed template as Terence describes to use it, but mine can be applied to both RSS and Atom.2
I’ve still got more I’d like to do with this, for example to take advantage of the thumbnail images I attach to posts. On which note…
When I first started offering email subscription options I used Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email service, which was… okay, but not great, and I didn’t like the privacy implications that came along with it. Mailchimp support adding thumbnails to your email template from your feed, but WordPress themes don’t by-default provide the appropriate metadata to allow them to do that. So I installed Jordy Meow‘s RSS Featured Image plugin which did it for me.
<item> <title>[Checkin] Geohashing expedition 2023-07-27 51 -1</title> <link>https://danq.me/2023/07/27/geohashing-expedition-2023-07-27-51-1/</link> ... <media:content url="https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2023/07/20230727_141710-1024x576.jpg" medium="image" /> <media:description>Dan, wearing a grey Three Rings hoodie, carrying French Bulldog Demmy, standing on a path with trees in the background.</media:description> </item>
During my little redesign earlier this year I decided to go two steps further: (1) ditching the
plugin and implementing the functionality directly into my theme (it’s really not very much code!), and (2) adding not only a <media:content medium="image" url="..."
/> element but also a <media:description> providing the default alt-text for that image. I don’t know if any feed readers (correctly) handle this
accessibility-improving feature, but my stylesheet above will, some day!
Here’s how that’s done:
function rss_insert_namespace_for_featured_image() { echo "xmlns:media=\"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/\"\n"; } function rss_insert_featured_image( $comments ) { global $post; $image_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ); if( ! $image_id ) return; $image = get_the_post_thumbnail_url( $post->ID, 'large' ); $image_url = esc_url( $image ); $image_alt = esc_html( get_post_meta( $image_id, '_wp_attachment_image_alt', true ) ); $image_title = esc_html( get_the_title( $image_id ) ); $image_description = empty( $image_alt ) ? $image_title : $image_alt; if ( !empty( $image ) ) { echo <<<EOF <media:content url="{$image_url}" medium="image" /> <media:description>{$image_description}</media:description> EOF; } } add_action( 'rss2_ns', 'rss_insert_namespace_for_featured_image' ); add_action( 'rss2_item', 'rss_insert_featured_image' );
So there we have it: a little digital gardening, and four improvements to WordPress’s default feeds.
RSS may not be as hip as it once was, but little improvements can help new users find their way into this (enlightened?) way to consume the Web.
If you’re using RSS to follow my blog, great! If it’s not for you, perhaps pick your favourite alternative way to get updates, from options including email, Telegram, the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), and more…
Update 4 September 2023: More-recently, I’ve improved WordPress RSS feeds by preventing them from automatically converting emoji into images.
1 The changes apply to the Atom feed too, for anybody of such an inclination. Just assume that if I say RSS I’m including Atom, okay?
2 The experience of writing this transformation/stylesheet also gave me yet another opportunity to remember how much I hate working with XSLTs. This time around, in addition to the normal namespace issues and headscratching syntax, I had to deal with the fact that I initially tried to use a feature from XSLT version 2.0 (a 22-year-old version) only to discover that all major web browsers still only support version 1.0 (specified last millenium)!
This week, Ruth and I didn’t go the Isle of Man.
It’s (approximately) our 0x10th anniversary1,
and, struggling to find a mutually-convenient window in our complex work schedules, we’d opted to spend a few days exploring the Isle of Man. Everything was fine, until we were aboard
the ‘plane.
Once everybody was seated and ready to take off, the captain stood up at the front of the ‘plane and announced that it had been cancelled2.
The Isle of Man closes, he told us (we assume he just meant the airport) and while they’d be able to get us there before it did, there wouldn’t be sufficient air traffic control crew to allow them to get back (to, presumably, the cabin crews’ homes in London).
Back at the terminal we made our way through border control (showing my passport despite having not left the airport, never mind the country) and tried to arrange a rebooking, only to be told that they could only manage to get us onto a flight that’d be leaving 48 hours later, most of the way through our mini-break, so instead we opted for a refund and gave up.3
We resolved to try to do the same kinds of things that we’d hoped to do on the Isle of Man, but closer to home: some sightseeing, some walks, some spending-time-together. You know the drill.
A particular highlight of our trip to the North Leigh Roman Villa – one of those “on your doorstep so you never go” places – was when the audio tour advised us to beware of the snails when crossing what was once the villa’s central courtyard.
At first we thought this was an attempt at humour, but it turns out that the Romans brought with them to parts of Britain a variety of large edible snail – helix pomatia – which can still be found in concentration in parts of the country where they were widely farmed.4
There’s a nice little geocache near the ruin, too, which we were able to find on our way back.
Before you think that I didn’t get anything out of my pointless hours at the airport, though, it turns out I’d brought home a souvenier… a stinking cold! How about that for efficiency: I got all the airport-germs, but none of the actual air travel. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday I was feeling pretty rotten, and it only got worse from then on.
I’m confident that Ruth didn’t mind too much that I spent Wednesday mostly curled up in a sad little ball, because it let her get on with applying to a couple of jobs she’s interested in. Because it turns out there was a third level of disaster to this week: in addition to our ‘plane being cancelled and me getting sick, this week saw Ruth made redundant as her employer sought to dig itself out of a financial hole. A hat trick of bad luck!
As Ruth began to show symptoms (less-awful than mine, thankfully) of whatever plague had befallen me, we bundled up in bed and made not one but two abortive attempts at watching a film together:
As Thursday drew on and the pain in my head and throat was replaced with an unrelenting cough, I decided I needed some fresh air.
So while Ruth collected the shopping, I found my way to the 2023-07-27 51 -1 geohashpoint. And came back wheezing and in need of a lie-down.
I find myself wondering if (despite three jabs and a previous infection) I’ve managed to contract covid again, but I haven’t found the inclination to take a test. What would I do differently if I do have it, now, anyway? I feel like we might be past that point in our lives.
All in all, probably the worst anniversary celebration we’ve ever had, and hopefully the worst we’ll ever have. But a fringe benefit of a willingness to change bases is that we can celebrate our 10th5 anniversary next year, too. Here’s to that.
1 Because we’re that kind of nerds, we count our anniversaries in base 16
(0x10 is 16), or – sometimes – in whatever base is mathematically-pleasing and gives us a nice round number. It could be our 20th anniversary, if you prefer octal.
2 I’ve been on some disastrous aeroplane journeys before, including one just earlier this year which was supposed to take me from Athens to Heathrow, got re-arranged to go to Gatwick, got delayed, ran low on fuel, then instead had to fly to Stansted, wait on the tarmac for a couple of hours, then return to Gatwick (from which I travelled – via Heathrow – home). But this attempt to get to the Isle of Man was somehow, perhaps, even worse.
3 Those who’ve noticed that we were flying EasyJet might rightly give a knowing nod at this point.
4 The warning to take care not to tread on them is sound legal advice: this particular variety of snail is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981!
5 Next year will be our 10th anniversary… in base 17. Eww, what the hell is base 17 for and why does it both offend and intrigue me so?
This checkin to geohash 2023-07-27 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.
Northern boundary hedge of West Witney Primary School, Witney
I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be on the Isle of Man with my partner, celebrating our 0x10th anniversary. But
this week’s been a week of disasters: my partner lost her job, our plane to the Isle of Man got cancelled, and then I got sick (most-likely, I got to catch airport germs from people I
got to sit next to on an aircraft which was then cancelled before it had a chance to take off). So mostly this week I’ve been sat at home playing video games.
But the dog needed a walk, and my partner needed to go to the supermarket, so I had her drop me and the geopooch off in West Witney to find the hashpoint and then walk to meet them after she’d collected the shopping. I couldn’t find my GPSr, so I used my phone, and it was reporting low accuracy until I rebooted it, by which time I’d walked past the hashpoint and had to double-back, much to the doggo’s confusion.
I reached the hashpoint at 14:16 BST (and probably a few points before than, owing to my navigation failure). I needed to stand very close to the fence to get within the circle of uncertainty, but at least I didn’t have to reach through and into the school grounds.
My smartwatch kept a tracklog:
This checkin to GCXWEX Villa View reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with Ruth after coming out to explore the spectacular Roman villa. We’d supposed to have been out of the Isle of Man celebrating our anniversary, but our ‘plane got cancelled, so we’ve opted for staying at home and doing local cycling expeditions instead. SL, TFTC.
There’s a perception that a blog is a long-lived, ongoing thing. That it lives with and alongside its author.1
But that doesn’t have to be true, and I think a lot of people could benefit from “short-term” blogging. Consider:
One of my favourite examples of such a blog was 52 Reflect3 (now integrated into its successor The Improbable Blog). For 52 consecutive weeks my partner‘s brother Robin blogged about adventures that took him out of his home in London and it was amazing. The project’s finished, but a blog was absolutely the right medium for it because now it’s got a “forever home” on the Web (imagine if he’d posted instead to Twitter, only for that platform to turn into a flaming turd).
I don’t often shill for my employer, but I genuinely believe that the free tier on WordPress.com is an excellent way to give a forever home to your short-term blog4. Did you know that you can type new.blog (or blog.new; both work!) into your browser to start one?
What are you going to write about?
1 This blog is, of course, an example of a long-term blog. It’s been going in some form or another for over half my life, and I don’t see that changing. But it’s not the only kind of blog.
2 Personally, I really love the serendipity of asking a web search engine for the solution to a problem and finding a result that turns out to be something that I myself wrote, long ago!
3 My previous posts about 52 Reflect: Challenge Robin, Twatt, Brixton to Brighton by Boris Bike, Ending on a High (and associated photo/note)
4 One of my favourite features of WordPress.com is the fact that it’s built atop the world’s most-popular blogging software and you can export all your data at any time, so there’s absolutely no lock-in: if you want to migrate to a competitor or even host your own blog, it’s really easy to do so!