blogging – Page 4

Making an RSS feed of YOURLS shortlinks

As you might know if you were paying close attention in Summer 2019, I run a “URL shortener” for my personal use. You may be familiar with public URL shorteners like TinyURL and Bit.ly: my personal URL shortener is basically the same thing, except that only I am able to make short-links with it. Compared to public ones, this means I’ve got a larger corpus of especially-short (e.g. 2/3 letter) codes available for my personal use. It also means that I’m not dependent on the goodwill of a free siloed service and I can add exactly the features I want to it.

For the last nine years my link shortener has been S.2, a tool I threw together in Ruby. It stores URLs in a sequentially-numbered database table and then uses the Base62-encoding of the primary key as the “code” part of the short URL. Aside from the fact that when I create a short link it shows me a QR code to I can easily “push” a page to my phone, it doesn’t really have any “special” features. It replaced S.1, from which it primarily differed by putting the code at the end of the URL rather than as part of the domain name, e.g. s.danq.me/a0 rather than a0.s.danq.me: I made the switch because S.1 made HTTPS a real pain as well as only supporting Base36 (owing to the case-insensitivity of domain names).

But S.2’s gotten a little long in the tooth and as I’ve gotten busier/lazier, I’ve leant into using or adapting open source tools more-often than writing my own from scratch. So this week I switched my URL shortener from S.2 to YOURLS.

Screenshot of YOURLS interface showing Dan Q's list of shortened links. Six are shown of 1,939 total. — YOURLs isn’t the prettiest tool in the world, but then it doesn’t have to be: only I ever see the interface pictured above!

One of the things that attracted to me to YOURLS was that it had a ready-to-go Docker image. I’m not the biggest fan of Docker in general, but I do love the convenience of being able to deploy applications super-quickly to my household NAS. This makes installing and maintaining my personal URL shortener much easier than it used to be (and it was pretty easy before!).

Another thing I liked about YOURLS is that it, like S.2, uses Base62 encoding. This meant that migrating my links from S.2 into YOURLS could be done with a simple cross-database INSERT... SELECT statement:

INSERT INTO yourls.yourls_url(keyword, url, title, `timestamp`, clicks)
  SELECT shortcode, url, title, created_at, 0 FROM danq_short.links

But do you know what’s a bigger deal for my lifestack than my URL shortener? My RSS reader! I’ve written about it a lot, but I use RSS for just about everything and my feed reader is my first, last, and sometimes only point of contact with the Web! I’m so hooked-in to my RSS ecosystem that I’ll use my own middleware to add feeds to sites that don’t have them, or for which I’m not happy with the feed they provide, e.g. stripping sports out of BBC News, subscribing to webcomics that don’t provide such an option (sometimes accidentally hacking into sites on the way), and generating “complete” archives of series’ of posts so I can use my reader to track my progress.

One of S.1/S.2’s features was that it exposed an RSS feed at a secret URL for my reader to ingest. This was great, because it meant I could “push” something to my RSS reader to read or repost to my blog later. YOURLS doesn’t have such a feature, and I couldn’t find anything in the (extensive) list of plugins that would do it for me. I needed to write my own.

Partial list of Dan's RSS feed subscriptions, including Jeremy Keith, Jim Nielson, Natalie Lawhead, Bruce Schneier, Scott O'Hara, "Yahtzee", BBC News, and several podcasts, as well as (highlighted) "Dan's Short Links", which has 5 unread items. — In some ways, subscribing “to yourself” is a strange thing to do. In other ways… shut up, I’ll do what I like.

I could have written a YOURLS plugin. Or I could have written a stack of code in Ruby, PHP, Javascript or some other language to bridge these systems. But as I switched over my shortlink subdomain s.danq.me to its new home at danq.link, another idea came to me. I have direct database access to YOURLS (and the table schema is super simple) and the command-line MariaDB client can output XML… could I simply write an XML Transformation to convert database output directly into a valid RSS feed? Let’s give it a go!

I wrote a script like this and put it in my crontab:

mysql --xml yourls -e                                                                                                                     \
      "SELECT keyword, url, title, DATE_FORMAT(timestamp, '%a, %d %b %Y %T') AS pubdate FROM yourls_url ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 30" \
    | xsltproc template.xslt -                                                                                                            \
    | xmllint --format -                                                                                                                  \
    > output.rss.xml

The first part of that command connects to the yourls database, sets the output format to XML, and executes an SQL statement to extract the most-recent 30 shortlinks. The DATE_FORMAT function is used to mould the datetime into something approximating the RFC-822 standard for datetimes as required by RSS. The output produced looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<resultset statement="SELECT keyword, url, title, timestamp FROM yourls_url ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 30" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <row>
        <field name="keyword">VV</field>
        <field name="url">https://webdevbev.co.uk/blog/06-2021/perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good.html</field>
        <field name="title"> Perfect is the enemy of good || Web Dev Bev</field>
        <field name="timestamp">2021-09-26 17:38:32</field>
  </row>
  <row>
        <field name="keyword">VU</field>
        <field name="url">https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-the-web/</field>
        <field name="title">Why Generation X will save the web  Hi, Im Heather Burns</field>
        <field name="timestamp">2021-09-26 17:38:26</field>
  </row>

  <!-- ... etc. ... -->
  
</resultset>

We don’t see this, though. It’s piped directly into the second part of the command, which uses xsltproc to apply an XSLT to it. I was concerned that my XSLT experience would be super rusty as I haven’t actually written any since working for my former employer SmartData back in around 2005! Back then, my coworker Alex and I spent many hours doing XML backflips to implement a system that converted complex data outputs into PDF files via an XSL-FO intermediary.

I needn’t have worried, though. Firstly: it turns out I remember a lot more than I thought from that project a decade and a half ago! But secondly, this conversion from MySQL/MariaDB XML output to RSS turned out to be pretty painless. Here’s the template.xslt I ended up making:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="resultset">
    <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
      <channel>
        <title>Dan's Short Links</title>
        <description>Links shortened by Dan using danq.link</description>
        <link> [ MY RSS FEED URL ] </link>
        <atom:link href=" [ MY RSS FEED URL ] " rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
        <lastBuildDate><xsl:value-of select="row/field[@name='pubdate']" /> UTC</lastBuildDate>
        <pubDate><xsl:value-of select="row/field[@name='pubdate']" /> UTC</pubDate>
        <ttl>1800</ttl>
        <xsl:for-each select="row">
          <item>
            <title><xsl:value-of select="field[@name='title']" /></title>
            <link><xsl:value-of select="field[@name='url']" /></link>
            <guid>https://danq.link/<xsl:value-of select="field[@name='keyword']" /></guid>
            <pubDate><xsl:value-of select="field[@name='pubdate']" /> UTC</pubDate>
          </item>
        </xsl:for-each>
      </channel>
    </rss>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

That uses the first (i.e. most-recent) shortlink’s timestamp as the feed’s pubDate, which makes sense: unless you’re going back and modifying links there’s no more-recent changes than the creation date of the most-recent shortlink. Then it loops through the returned rows and creates an <item> for each; simple!

The final step in my command runs the output through xmllint to prettify it. That’s not strictly necessary, but it was useful while debugging and as the whole command takes milliseconds to run once every quarter hour or so I’m not concerned about the overhead. Using these native binaries (plus a little configuration), chained together with pipes, had already resulted in way faster performance (with less code) than if I’d implemented something using a scripting language, and the result is a reasonably elegant “scratch your own itch”-type solution to the only outstanding barrier that was keeping me on S.2.

All that remained for me to do was set up a symlink so that the resulting output.rss.xml was accessible, over the web, to my RSS reader. I hope that next time I’m tempted to write a script to solve a problem like this I’ll remember that sometimes a chain of piped *nix utilities can provide me a slicker, cleaner, and faster solution.

Update: Right as I finished writing this blog post I discovered that somebody had already solved this problem using PHP code added to YOURLS; it’s just not packaged as a plugin so I didn’t see it earlier! Whether or not I use this alternate approach or stick to what I’ve got, the process of implementing this YOURLS-database ➡ XML ➡ XSLT ➡ RSS chain was fun and informative.

Note #19508

When do I #blog? A breakdown of my top four #indieweb content types – articles, reposts, checkins and notes – by month.

Unsurprisingly my checkins, which represent #geocaching/#geohashing activity, grow in the spring and peak in the summer when the weather’s better!

At first I assumed the notes peak in November might have been thrown off by a single conference, e.g. musetech, but it turns out I’ve just done more note-friendly things in Novembers, like Challenge Robin II and my Cape Town meetup, which are enough to throw the numbers off.

Reply to “I was permanently banned by Facebook”

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Donncha Ó Caoimh said:

My Facebook account was permanently banned on Wednesday along with all the people who take care of the Cork Skeptics page. We’re still not sure why but it might have something to do with the Facebook algorithm used to detect far-right conspiracy groups.

…

If you have a Facebook account you should download your information too because it could happen to you too, even though you did nothing wrong. Go here and click the “Create File” button now.

Yeah, I know you won’t do it but you really should.

…

Great advice.

After I got banned from Facebook in 2011 (for using a “fake name”, which is actually my real name) I took a similar line of thinking: I can’t trust Facebook (or Twitter, or Instagram, or whoever else) to be responsible custodians of my content, so I shan’t. Now, virtually all content I create is hosted on my WordPress-powered blog, at my own domain, first and foremost… and syndicated copies may appear on various social media.

In a very few instances I go the other way around, producing content in silos and then copying it back to my blog: e.g. my geocaching/geohashing expeditions are posted first to their respective sites (because it’s easiest and most-practical to do that using their apps, especially “in the field”), but then they get imported into my blog using a custom plugin. If any of these sites closes, deletes my data, adds paid tiers I’m not happy with, or just bans me from my own account… I’m still set.

Backing up all your social content is a good strategy. Owning it all to begin with is an even better one, IMHO. See also: Indieweb.

Thames Path 2

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

On our first day‘s walking along the Thames Path, Robin and I had trouble finding any evidence of water for some time. On our second day, we did not have this problem.

After weeks of sustained rain, the fields we walked over as we left Cricklade behind were extremely soggy. On our way out of town we passed Cricklade Millennium Wood, I took a picture for the purpose of mocking it for being very small but later discovered it’s too small to appear on Google Maps and became oddly defensive of it – it’s trying, damn it, we should at least acknowledge its existence.

…

Ruth Trevor-Allen

Ruth and her brother Robin (of Challenge Robin/Challenge Robin II fame on this blog, among many other crazy adventures) have taken it upon themselves to walk the entirety of the Thames Path from the source of the river (or rather, one of the many symbolic sources) to the sea, over the course of a series of separate one-day walks. I’ve mostly been acting as backup-driver so far, but I might join them for a leg or two later on.

In any case, Ruth’s used it as a welcome excuse to dust off her blog and write about the experience, and it’s fun and delightful and you should follow along and give her a digital cheer. The first part is here; the second part landed yesterday.

Celebrate Seventeen

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May 27th, 17 years ago, the first release of WordPress was put into the world by Mike Little and myself. It did not have an installer, upgrades, WYSIWYG editor (or hardly any Javascript), comment spam protection, clean permalinks, caching, widgets, themes, plugins, business model, or any funding.

…

Matt Mullenweg

Seventeen years ago, WordPress was first released.

Sixteen years, eleven months ago, I relaunched I relaunched my then-dormant blog. I considered WordPress/b2/cafelog, but went with a now-dead engine called Flip instead.

Fifteen years, ten months ago, in response to a technical failure on the server I was using, I lost it all and had to recover my posts from backups. Immediately afterwards, I took the opportunity to redesign my blog and switch to WordPress. On the same day, I attended the graduation ceremony for my first degree (but somehow didn’t think this was worth blogging about).

Fifteen years, nine months ago, Automattic Inc. was founded to provide managed WordPress hosting services. Some time later, I thought to myself: hey, they seem like a cool company, and I like everything Matt’s done so far. I should perhaps work there someday.

Lots of time passed.

Seven months ago, I got around to doing that.

Happy birthday, WordPress!

Thursday

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Today is Thursday. YOU MUST NOT GO OUTSIDE!

Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for Great Britain, is set to publish revised maps for the whole of the British isles in the wake of social distancing measures. The new 1:50,000 scale maps are simply a revision of the older 1:25,000 scale map but all geographical features have been moved further apart.

…

Gareth J M Saunders (You must not go outside!)

Gareth’s providing a daily briefing including all the important things that the government wants you to know about the coronavirus crisis… and a few things that they didn’t think to tell you, but perhaps they should’ve. Significantly more light-hearted than wherever you’re getting your news from right now.

Happy Birthday, You’re Fired

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

I walked the dog, bought myself a wax jacket from a local garden centre – so I could feel more ‘Country’ – and in the late afternoon my boss called me to say… you’re fired.

…

Robin Varley (Pandemiconium)

So begins Robin‘s latest blog (you may remember I’ve shared, talked about, and contributed to the success of his previous blogging adventure, 52 Reflect). This time around, it sort-of reads like a contemporaneously-written “what I did on my holidays” report, except that it’s pretty-much about the opposite of a holiday: it chronicles Robin’s adventures in the North of England during these strange times.

I’ve no doubt that this represents the start of another riotous series of posts and perhaps exactly what you need to lift your spirits in these trying times. A second chapter is already online.

Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds

I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.

But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php:

// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post.
function add_kind_to_rss_post_title(){
        $kinds = wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' );
        if( ! isset( $kinds ) || empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check.
        $kind = $kinds[0]->name;
        $title = get_the_title();
        return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" );
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.

This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:

Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.

Note #16213

Nice simple design, @typehut, but with no RSS, Atom, nor h-feed you’ve made a blog platform to which readers can only subscribe by email. 😢

Third party

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…why would cookies ever need to work across domains? Authentication, shopping carts and all that good stuff can happen on the same domain. Third-party cookies, on the other hand, seem custom made for tracking and frankly, not much else.

…

Then there’s third-party JavaScript.

In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that third-party JavaScript is even possible. I mean, putting arbitrary code—that can then inject even more arbitrary code—onto your website? That seems like a security nightmare!

I imagine if JavaScript were being specced today, it would almost certainly be restricted to the same origin by default.

…

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy hits the nail on the head with third-party cookies and Javascript: if the Web were invented today, there’s no way that these potentially privacy and security-undermining features would be on by default, globally. I’m not sure that they’d be universally blocked at the browser level as Jeremy suggests, though: the Web has always been about empowering developers, acting as a playground for experimentation, and third-party stuff does provide benefits: sharing a login across multiple subdomains, for example (which in turn can exist as a security feature, if different authors get permission to add content to those subdomains).

Instead, then, I imagine that a Web re-invented today would treat third-party content a little like we treat CORS or we’re beginning to treat resource types specified by Content-Security-Policy and Feature-Policy headers. That is, website owners would need to “opt-in” to which third-party domains could be trusted to provide content, perhaps subdivided into scripts and cookies. This wouldn’t prohibit trackers, but it would make their use less of an assumed-default (develolpers would have to truly think about the implications of what they were enabling) and more transparent: it’d be very easy for a browser to list (and optionally block, sandbox, or anonymise) third-party trackers could potentially target them, on a given site, without having to first evaluate any scripts and their sources.

I was recently inspired by Dave Rupert to remove Google Analytics from this blog. For a while, there’ll have been no third-party scripts being delivered on this site at all, except through iframes (for video embedding etc., which is different anyway because there’s significantly less scope leak). Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Jetpack because I get it for free through my new employer, but I’m always looking for ways to improve how well my site “stands alone”: you can block all third-party resources and this site should still work just fine (I wonder if I can add a feature to my service worker to allow visitors to control exactly what third party content they’re exposed to?).

Consume less, create more

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

Perhaps three people will read this essay, including my parents. Despite that, I feel an immense sense of accomplishment. I’ve been sitting on buses for years, but I have more to show for my last month of bus rides than the rest of that time combined.

Smartphones, I’ve decided, are not evil. This entire essay was composed on an iPhone. What’s evil is passive consumption, in all its forms.

…

TJCX

This amazing essay really hammers home a major part of why I blog at all. Creating things on the Web is good. Creating things at all is good.

A side-effect of social media culture (repost, reshare, subscribe, like) is that it’s found perhaps the minimum-effort activity that humans can do that still fulfils our need to feel like we’ve participated in our society. With one tap we can pass on a meme or a funny photo or an outrageous news story. Or we can give a virtual thumbs-up or a heart on a friend’s holiday snaps, representing the entirety of our social interactions with them. We’re encouraged to create the smallest, lightest content possible: forty words into a Tweet, a picture on Instagram that we took seconds ago and might never look at again, on Facebook… whatever Facebook’s for these days. The “new ‘netiquette” is complicated.

I, for one, think it’d be a better world if it saw a greater diversity of online content. Instead of many millions of followers of each of a million content creators, wouldn’t it be nice to see mere thousands of each of billions? I don’t propose to erode the fame of those who’ve achieved Internet celebrity; but I’d love to migrate towards a culture in which we can all better support one another’s drive to create original content online. And do so ourselves.

The best time to write on your blog is… well, let’s be honest, it was a decade ago. But the second best time is right now. Or if you’d rather draw, or sing, or dance, or make puzzles or games or films… do that. The barrier to being a content creator has never been lower: publishing is basically free and virtually any digital medium is accessible from even the simplest of devices. Go make something, and share it with the world.

(with thanks to Jeremy for the reshare)

Subscribe by Email

For the last few months, I’ve been running an alpha test of an email-based subscription to DanQ.me with a handful of handpicked testers. Now, I’d like to open it up to a slightly larger beta test group. If you’d like to get the latest from this site directly in your inbox, just provide your email address below:

Subscribe by email!

Who’s this for?

Some people prefer to use their email inbox to subscribe to things. If that’s you: great!

What will I receive?

You’ll get a “daily digest”, no more than once per day, summarising everything I’ve published within the last 24 hours. It usually works: occasionally but not often it misses things. You can unsubscribe with one click at any time.

How else can I subscribe?

You can still subscribe in a variety of other ways. Personally, I recommend using a feed reader which lets you choose exactly which kinds of content you’re interested in, but there are plenty of options including Facebook and Twitter (for those of such an inclination).

Didn’t you do this before?

Yes, I ran a “subscribe by email” system back in 2007 but didn’t maintain it. Things might be better this time around. Maybe.

So You Want To Start An Unpopular Blog

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Very occasionally I get asked how to start blogging by people who would like to create exciting and engaging articles that will build a following by delighting an audience hungry for more. Perhaps they envision spreading their views far across the face of the web.

To which I always reply, “Have you read my blog? I don’t know about any of those things!”

What I do have are 10 years of logs and some vague observations about beginning a blog.

…

Andrew Stephens

As I’m sat here anyway, helping people get started on the Indieweb, here’s a great (tongue in cheek) look at how you can expect your new ~~blog~~ Indieweb presence to take off and become the Most Popular Thing Ever. Or rather, not.

But as I and others have said before, my blog is first and foremost for me. If you get something out of it too, that’s great, but that’s a secondary goal!

Motorbiking to Scotland

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…

This adventure took a lot of planning. It’s 350 miles from where I live to Glasgow. I have a Honda CG 125cc, and my maximum range in one day is around 200 miles – if I have the full day for travelling, which I wouldn’t have, most days. I figured if I was going to have a road trip, I’d have to make stop offs at various parts of the UK, to break it up. This actually worked out really well, as there are lots of parts of the UK that I wanted to visit.

…

After booking the series of hotel rooms, I started to think about the actual riding. It was two weeks before the trip. I didn’t have enough thermals, or a bike suit that was protective enough. I also didn’t have a way of storing luggage on my bike, or keeping it dry (and two laptops would be in the bags). There was also an issue with the chain on my bike that needed fixing. Not exactly a trivial to do list! So the next two weeks turned into a bit of an eBay and Amazon frenzy, with a trip down to see my dad in Kent to get the bike chain fixed, and rummage around for my old waterproofs in my grandparent’s attic. It was pretty close: the final item arrived the day before the trip. I got ridiculously lucky on eBay with my new, more visible, better padded, comfy bike suit though, which I love to bits. In hindsight, more time for all of this would have been helpful!

…

Beverley Newing

My friend Bev wrote about their motorcycling adventure up and down the UK; it’s pretty awesome.

DanQ.me Ecosystem

With IndieWebCamp Oxford 2019 scheduled to take place during the Summer of Hacks, I drew a diagram (click to embiggen) of the current ecosystem that powers and propogates the content on DanQ.me. It’s mostly for my own benefit – to be able to get a big-picture view of the ways my website talks to the world and plan for what improvements I might be able to make in the future… but it also works as a vehicle to explain what my personal corner of the IndieWeb does and how it does it. Here’s a summary:

DanQ.me

Since fifteen years ago today, DanQ.me has been powered by a self-hosted WordPress installation. I know that WordPress isn’t “hip” on the IndieWeb this week and that if you’re not on the JAMstack you’re yesterday’s news, but at 15 years and counting my love affair with WordPress has lasted longer than any romantic relationship I’ve ever had with another human being, so I’m sticking with it. What’s cool in Web technologies comes and goes, but what’s important is solid, dependable tools that do what you need them to, and between WordPress, half a dozen off-the-shelf plugins and about a dozen homemade ones I’ve got everything I need right here.

I write articles (long posts like this) and notes (short, “tweet-like” updates) directly into the site, and just occasionally other kinds of content. But for the most part, different kinds of content come from different parts of the ecosystem, as described below.

RSS reader

DanQ.me sits at the centre of the diagram, but it’s worth remembering that the diagram is deliberately incomplete: it only contains information flows directly relevant to my blog (and it doesn’t even contain all of those!). The last time I tried to draw a diagram like this that described my online life in general, then my RSS reader found its way to the centre. Which figures: my RSS reader is usually the first and often the last place I visit on the Internet, and I’ve worked hard to funnel everything through it.

Right now I’m using FreshRSS – plus a handful of plugins, including some homemade ones – as my RSS reader: I switched from Tiny Tiny RSS about a year ago to take advantage of FreshRSS’s excellent responsive themes, among other features. Because some websites don’t have RSS feeds, even where they ought to, I use my own tool RSSey to retroactively “fix” people’s websites for them, dynamically adding feeds for my consumption. It’s also a nice reminder that open source and remixability were cornerstones of the original Web. My RSS reader collates information from a variety of sources and additionally gives me a one-click mechanism to push content I enjoy to my blog as a repost.

QTube

QTube is my video hosting platform; it’s a PeerTube node. If you haven’t seen it, that’s fine: most content on it is consumed indirectly either through my YouTube channel or directly on my blog as posts of the “video” kind. Also, I don’t actually vlog very often. When I do publish videos onto QTube, their republication onto YouTube or DanQ.me is optional: sometimes I plan to use a video inside an article post, for example, and so don’t need to republish it by itself.

I’m gradually exporting or re-uploading my backlog of YouTube videos from my current and previous channels to QTube in an effort to recentralise and regain control over their hosting, but I’m in no real hurry. PeerTube certainly makes it easy, though!

Link Shortener

I operate a private link shortener which I mostly use for the expected purpose: to make links shorter and so easier to read out and memorise or else to make them take up less space in a chat window. But soon after I set it up, many years ago, I realised that it could also act as a mechanism to push content to my RSS reader to “read later”. And by the time I’m using it for that, I figured, I might as well also be using it to repost content to my blog from sources that aren’t things my RSS reader subscribes to. This leads to a process that’s perhaps unnecessarily complex: if I want to share a link with you as a repost, I’ll push it into my link shortener and mark it as going “to me”, then I’ll tell my RSS reader to push it to my blog and there it’ll be published to the world! But it works and it’s fast enough: I’m not in the habit of reposting things that are time-critical anyway.

Checkins

I’ve been involved in brainstorming ways in which the act of finding (or failing to find, etc.) a geocache or reaching (or failing to reach) a geohashpoint could best be represented as a “checkin“, and last year I open-sourced my plugin for pulling logs (with as much automation as is permitted by the terms of service of some of the silos involved) from geocaching websites and posting them to WordPress blogs: effectively PESOS-for-geocaching. I’d prefer to be publishing on my own blog in the first instance, but syndicating my adventures from various silos into my blog is “good enough”.

Syndication

New notes get pushed out to my Twitter account, for the benefit of my Twitter-using friends. Articles get advertised on Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal (yes, really) in teaser form, for the benefit of friends who prefer to get notifications via those platforms. Facebook have been fucking around with their APIs and terms of service lately and this is now less-automatic than it used to be, which is a bit of an annoyance. My RSS feeds carry copies of content out to people who prefer to subscribe via that medium, and I’ve also been using this to power an experimental MailChimp “daily digest” mailing list of “what Dan’s been up to” to a small number of friends, right in their email inboxes: I’ve not made it available to everybody yet, but if you’re happy to help test it then give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.

Finally, a couple of IFTTT recipes push my articles and my reposts to Reddit communities: I don’t really use Reddit myself, any more, but I’ve got friends in a few places there who prefer to keep up-to-date with what I’m up to via that medium. For historical reasons, my reposts to Reddit don’t go directly via my blog’s RSS feeds but “shortcut” directly from my RSS reader: this is suboptimal because I don’t get to tweak post titles for Reddit but it’s not a big deal.

I used to syndicate content to Google+ (before it joined the long list of Things Google Have Killed) and to Ello (but it never got much traction there). I’ve probably historically syndicated to other places too: I’ve certainly manually-republished content to other blogs, from time to time, too.

Backfeed

I use Ryan Barrett‘s excellent Brid.gy to convert Twitter replies and likes back into Webmentions for publication as comments on my blog. This used to work for Facebook, too, but again: Facebook fucked it over. I’ve occasionally manually backfed significant Facebook comments, but it’s not ideal: I might like to look at using similar technologies to RSSey to subvert Facebook’s limitations.

Reintegration

I’ve routinely retroactively reintegrated content that I’ve produced elsewhere on the Web. This includes my previous blogs (which is why you can browse my archives, right here on this site, all the way back to some of the cringeworthy angsty-teenager posts I made in the 1990s) but also some Reddit posts, some replies originally posted directly to other people’s blogs, all my old del.icio.us bookmarks, long-form forum posts, posts I made to mailing lists and newsgroups, and more. As a result, there’s a lot of backdated content on this site, nowadays: almost a million words, and significantly more than the 600,000 or so I counted a few years ago, before my biggest push for reintegration!

Cumulative wordcount per day, by content type. The lion’s share has always been articles, but reposts are creeping up as I’ve been writing more about the things I reshare, lately. It’d be interesting to graph the differentiation of this chart to see the periods of my life that I was writing the most: I have a hypothesis, and centralising my own content under my control makes it easier

Why do I do this? Because I really, really like owning my identity online! I’ve tried the “big” silo alternatives like Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram etc., and they’ve eventually always lead to disappointment, either because they get shut down or otherwise made-unusable, because of inappropriately-applied “real names” policies, because they give too much power to untrustworthy companies, because they impose arbitrary limitations on my content, because they manipulate output promotion (and exacerbate filter bubbles), or because they make the walls of their walled gardens taller and stop you integrating with them how you used to.

A handful of silos have shown themselves to be more-trustworthy than the average – in particular, eschewing techniques that promote “lock-in” – and I’d love to tell you more about them and what I think you should look for in a silo, another time. But for now: suffice to say that just like I don’t use YouTube like most people do, I elect not to use Facebook or Twitter in the conventional ways either. And it’s awesome, thanks.

There are plenty of reasons that people choose to take control of their own Web presence – and everybody who puts content online ought to consider it – but I imagine that few individuals have such a complicated publishing ecosystem as I do! Now you’ve got a picture of how my digital content production workflow works, and perhaps start owning your online identity, too.