Feed discovery 23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s — in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade." #
Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software. #
Feed discovery tips. How to help readers find your feed. #
I just spent my most productive hours of the day working on something I really thought would take about a half hour. But Ben's piece yesterday on why RSS matters really inspired me to take this stuff without so much fear.
Now I want to get back on track with the Discourse project for WordLand and FeedLand. It's the way the two things are joined to form a network. As usual, I made both pieces of software do a lot more than they have to do to serve this function, but did I know this function would exist when I wrote both of them? I did not. I had to have the pieces and then go for a few walks and long drives to figure it out. It was another benefit of driving from the southern Hudson Valley to Ottawa and back in the middle of October.
Anyway this will be another one of those bits that I attach posts to via "edges" — a new database table that's part of wpIdentity. It basically takes one post and points it at another. Posts are identified by an idSite and idPost. These are very easy to understand concepts, imho. You have a site, and you have a post. Combined they form a unique post in the universe of posts defined by WordPress and JetPack. But I am very aware that we need to leave room for other formats that identifiy a post, so our network can have more other software filling the platform role.
Anyway that's what's on my mind right now, other than it's snowing again, with big fat flakes, and it's kind of nice as long as the internet stays up.
PS: I put this post on Daveverse. I don't want people working on it to think it's too precious. Scott if you got purple pound signs working, go ahead and deploy. I do crazy stuff like that on my deployed sites too. Whatever. Live on the edge.