You can subscribe to new content on this site by using a variety of available feeds. Feedreaders should be able to discover the main feed and responses feed on their own. But there are more feeds available than just those two. This is a WordPress site, so almost everything also has its own RSS feed.
Main Feeds
- You can get all new content by following the main RSS feed (as listed in the right sidebar). The URL is just this blog’s URL with /feed at the end. This is true for all other types of feed, just add /feed at the end. This feed is also how I share my posts to Micro.blog/Ton
- In the past some feed readers have been blocked by my hosting provider as malicious bots. If that happens to you, you can use the Feedburner feed as an alternative. (But be aware that Google will collect data from you using their Feedburner service.) It also contains all postings.
- There is also a microformatted feed, h-feed, which provides JSON output. This however only has content that is shown on the front page of my blog, i.e. things I consider ‘main’ articles. The day to day observations and bookmarks etc. are not in that h-feed.
- There are two main feeds for responses to content, one for any type of response (including likes, mentions etc.), and one for comments only.
- Dutch language posts (feed), and German language posts (feed) both have their own feed. The default language is English and has no separate feed. All main feeds contain also the non-English postings.
Everything has a /feed
This is a WordPress site, so almost everything also has its own RSS feed. (WordPress.org page on feeds)
- If you add /feed to the URL of a single posting, you will get the feed for comments on that specific content-item.
- Every tag or category has its own feed. Go to the overview page and add /feed to the url. E.g. the posts with tag unconference at
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/tag/unconference/have their own feedhttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/tag/unconference/feed. Similarly a category overview likehttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/category/deutsch/, the category for German language posts hashttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/category/deutsch/feedas feed. There are different categories used by pages and by postings, so they have separate feeds. As the Digital Garden (wiki section) in this site is built from pages, this allows you to subscribe to the wiki, or individual wiki categories separately from my blog.
Browse. Search. Subscribe. Image by Kris Krüg, license CC BY SA
Following up on what seems a metablogging fashionable thing this spring, I added a /feeds page that provides an overview of all the various feeds you can subscribe to, to follow (parts of) my site’s content.
I recently came across the European SF portal, while searching for European SF magazines (if you know of any, do let me know). It had some interesting news items, so I wanted to subscribe. The site, nor the source html advertises a feed, but I did see it was made with WordPress. In WP everything has its feed, simply add /feed. Presto, subscribed.
Small and independent blogs are always full of surprises. The more blogs I stumble upon, the more genuinely surprised I am by the things people do with their blogs. It seemed like a good idea to summarize highlights here. I hope it might inspire non-bloggers to blog and bloggers to tinker more with their site—because obviously the tinkering never ends!
I randomly selected blogs for each thing. There are ample other sites that use that particular feature, but I had to start somewhere. Some blogs appear multiple times, probably making them even funkier! This list is incomplete, I’ll try to periodically update it as I encounter more cool stuff. Enjoy!
Content related
Publish reviews of books/music/… in a cool sortable grid: Chris Burnell’s Music
Hack together your own
last.fmto scrobble music to your own site: Jan Boddez’ Owning My ScrobblesSync your laptop battery, local weather, and current location with your site: Aaron Parecki’s homepage
Publicly display global website statistics: Luke Harris’ stats page
More stats: game playtime, AWStats server data: Roy Tang’s stats
Create and regularly update a “uses” page: Ru Singh’ uses page
Create and regularly update a “now” page: Derek Sivers’ the /now page movement
Auto-import game metadata from How Long To Beat and others: Jefklak’s Codex games page
Use your own site to publish checkins instead of Foursquare: Henrique Dias’ checkins
Regularly publish week reviews or link bundles: Stefan Imhoff’s Link Bundle #15
Have an “on this day” page that displays posts from previous years: Frank Meeuwsen’s on this day archive
Group multiple posts into series: Amos’ long-form series
Group multiple posts into research questions: Emmanuel Quartey’s questions section
Syndicate the HTTP blog to a Gemini capsule: Brain Baking Gemini (defunct)
List all emojis used on the site by frequency: Henrique Dias’ Emojis
Design related
Create an official coat of arms as the logo of your site: Marijn Florence’s heraldry adventure
Design your site around ever-evolving note-taking systems: Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen Notes
An audible frequency graph that determines posting activity: Chris Burnells’ All posts archive
Write a custom dynamic blog engine from scratch, because we can: Jan-Lukas Else’s blog
Implement a simple client-site search using lunr.js: Brain Baking archives
Show articles from others blogs you read below your own articles: an article from Drew DeVault
Use a public inbox as a commenting system: an article from Drew DeVault
Implement reaction buttons for each post: Jan-Lukas Else’s thoughts on reactions
Emulate the multi-pane layout of an e-mail client: Brian Lovin’s writings
Each post has a unique HTML design/layout: Aegir’s Words
IndieWeb related
Have a guestbook page where people can send Webmentions to to sign it: Ana Rodrigues’ guestbook
Collaborative pixel-art that gets saved every five minutes: Aaron Parecki’s IndieWebCamp Pixel Art
Publish replies to others’ sites using Webmentions: James’ Coffee Blog, Replies
Post Tweets on your own site first, then syndicate to Twitter: Sebastiaan Andeweg’s tweets
Summarize all IndieWeb-based RSVP events in a calendar: Jamie Tanna’s RSVPs
Work together on MicroPub/Sub as a new social reading protocol: Neal Mather’s blog
Join the IndieWeb ring to promote own and others’ sites: Horst Gutmann’s blog
Build a custom Webmention receiver/sender: IndieWeb examples
RSS related
Provide multiple RSS feeds for notes, articles, etc: Ton Zijlstra’s feeds
Add query capabilities to RSS feeds: Eli’s RSS navigational tips
Automatic publishing of favorites from an RSS reader: Peter Rukavina’s favorites
Styled OPML Blogrolls that can be imported into your reader: Ruben Schade’s Omake OPML
Styled RSS feeds to better explain what a web feed is: Matt Webb’s RSS feed
A “Reply via email” link in each RSS post to encourage interaction: Mike Harley’s RSS feed
Secret RSS-only posts that do not appear on the website: Ton Zijlstra’s RSS feed
Send out newsletters based on your RSS feed: Kev Quirk is newslettering again (defunct)
Add the location from where you write to your RSS feed: Ruben Schade’s RSS feed
Addendum 29th April: I never thought to receive that many positive feedback! This article is suddenly one of the most popular I recently wrote, made it to Lobste.rs and Hacker News, and was boosted over eight times on Mastodon. Funny, the more meta a blog article is, the more popular it is.
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Hello, my name is Ton Zijlstra I welcome conversation. Contacting me is easy and appreciated. Here is how I prefer to keep in touch, and…
A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
Theme related tweaks
Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
in the entry-footer template and the comments template
Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
Added a widget with projects I support
Added to the single post template a section that mentions and links the number of Hypothes.is annotations for that post, where they exist.
Functionality related tweaks
Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
Added an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
Added a /feeds page
Added a Now page
Added a Hello page
Added a way to share book lists / feeds.
Stopped embedding slide decks, and stopped embedding new Flickr photos (as well as removed older embeds, currently 23 postings between January 2013 and July 2018 still have them, and 22 postings from June 2006 to July 2009)
Removed all affilliate links to Amazon books as it entails tracking
Added an Index (using a plugin)
Added my own basic check-in and Dopplr style posts
Other tweaks
Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)