Payloads for RSS, aka Podcasts!
24 years ago today Dave Winer introduced Payloads for RSS — which became the structure of the entire podcasting world. If you listen to a podcast, you are using RSS with enclosures. I love the backstory that he disagreed with the premise but Adam Curry “persisted” and convinced him of the value.
RSS already does most of what we want. With the addition of the <enclosure> sub-element of <item> any RSS element can describe a video or audio file (actually any type of file).
<enclosure> has three attributes: url says where the file is located, length says how big it is, and type says what its type is. This way a workstation or aggregator can know in advance, without having to do any communication, what it’s going to get, and apply scheduling and filtering rules.
This is another great example of the power of open protocols and the open web! 🪄
Micro.blog Collections Shortcuts
I’ve gone “all in” on Micro.blog’s photo collection feature. I’ve created 64 collections so far which if I’m reading id numbers right means 17% of all collections on micro.blog are ones I made. 🤓
I needed some tooling in order to migrate to collections and use them the way that I want to. I’m sharing here the three shortcuts that I’ve created to do this: Creator, Copier, and Viewer.
Requirements to be aware of:
- You will need an App Token for these Shortcuts. Create one on your apps screen.
- These shortcuts, like most of my more complicated shortcuts, all use Logger for Shortcuts. Make sure to install that on your devices. It is free and a great utility. I debated removing the logging methods to avoid this dependency but these shortcuts can run for 20 or 30 seconds and it is very helpful to be able to see the logging output while it is running.
Collection Creator
I’ve updated my original Collection Creator shortcut through my own use. Most of my collections have been populated with this Shortcut. I’ve found it even more useful than I thought to be able to take a clipboard full of URLs and create a collection out of the linked images. I’ve used it for posts, for pages, and even some cases where I just grabbed a bunch of image links and create a collection.
Improvements since the first release:
- Improved confirmation prompts for clarity.
- Improved logging to be more useful and include progress indicators like “1 of n” to each item. 1
- After completing create the shortcode for the collection and put in the clipboard so ready to use.
- Minimal monitoring of API failure. 2
Add Micro.blog Collection Creator Shortcut
Collection Copier
I’m not sure how common this will be, but at times I want to include all the photos from one collection into another collection. For example:
- Blog post about a day of hiking in Switzerland uses a collection for that post.
- Page about that overall trip has a collection of photos for that trip.
- A photo page that contains all photos I’ve taken in Switzerland.
In this case these photos are in three collections. The easiest way to populate the aggregated collections would be to copy all photos from individual collections to them. It would be nice to “Add all photos from Collection X to Collection Y”. That is what this Shortcut does.
Add Micro.blog Collection Copier Shortcut
Collection Viewer
The viewer collection I don’t use a ton because it doesn’t do anything different than just looking at the collection on micro.blog. But I do like having the ability to quickly index into a collection and just verify what is in there so I’m keeping it around too. It was also the first Shortcut I wrote for this to figure out how to get into the API and see the responses.
Add Micro.blog Collection Viewer Shortcut
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The API method to add images to a collection was made much faster but it still takes about a second per image. This gives you a better indicator of where you are in the process. Think of it like a status bar. ↩︎
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I find it odd that in Shortcuts I cannot seem to retrieve the HTTP status code for an API call. I can access the body of the response, but not the status code. I now have the shortcut check the body of the API call to add the image to a collection and if there is any content there log a warning. I wish I could check for a 200 but it doesn’t seem possible. ↩︎
Podcast trends for 2024. 75 fewer hours of listening versus 2023. Pivot still my drive time podcast commuting to work. Subscribe to Making Sense and The Drive, but surprisingly low listen time with Attia. Mostly I listen to two, maybe three, podcasts.
Colorado Avalanche v Minnesota Wild tonight. Hockey is such a great live game. Fresh snow made it super difficult to get here - missed the first period. 3-1 with Colorado in the lead. 😬🏒
Threads Moderation Changes
There has been a lot of noise today about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on Threads about their moderation policies. My position is unchanged — private companies can choose their policies and along the lines of the law they can do what they wish. I don’t think it is even right to call it censorship. Am I being censored if I get kicked out of a mall for being a jerk? Nope.
I did find it wild that he posted this all exactly four years to the day from when he blocked Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram:
We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.
I actually temporarily disabled my blocker so I could access this. Text of Zuckerberg’s statement today, in normal text instead of a “Thread-storm”. Seriously people, blogs exist and you can type more than a sentence in a post. How about fixing that?
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:
- Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
- Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
- Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
- Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
- Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
- Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and l’m looking forward to this next chapter!
Support the Web via Open RSS
I recently discovered Open RSS via an article on Lifehacker highlighting how the service can provide feeds for some services that don’t do it themselves. I clicked through and was delighted to read more about Open RSS.
Open RSS is a non-profit advocating for the use of RSS. I read their about page in detail and it strongly resonated with me. Open protocols like RSS are an enabler to the open web and a way to create connection without all of the downsides of consolidated media platforms driven by a desire for data and engagement.
Open RSS also provides capability to discover and bridge RSS feeds for different sites (this is what the article was about). I’ve already suggested connecting POAPs to RSS. 🤓
I’m a care deeply about the kind of work this organization is doing. It is super small and grass roots. I’ve already had a few emails with Mark, one of the founders. This is a great opportunity to donate to a cause that is focused on the open Web. I think I just found the next organization that Weekly Thing Supporting Memberships can support!
POAP + RSS = Awesome?
I’m a big fan of POAP, and I’m a big fan of RSS. Sadly, these two things don’t know about each other, yet! This blog post is my take on a great start for RSS and POAP. Maybe there is a chance that the amazing folks at Open RSS could bridge this gap in the meantime!
First, why should POAP add RSS? I think there are dozens of use cases, but some examples…
- As someone that issues POAPs a lot I would love to subscribe to the RSS feeds for each of my events and see via the feed when a new token is claimed.
- It would be powerful to use automation on claims along by connecting the RSS feed for an event to IFTTT or any of the hundreds of services to take an action when an RSS feed is updated.
- There are several friends that are active in the POAP ecosystem and I can aggregate a feed of all their claims in the POAP Home app, but I would rather subscribe to an RSS feed of each of their addresses and get updates that way.
There are two items that RSS feeds would be useful for: Events and Collectors. There is a POAP API that would make both of these pretty simple to get, and avoid any screen scraping. An API key would be needed but I think that would be easy to get. These use cases are all read only as well.
Events
Anybody can create an event the RSS feed would be specific to that event. Events have a simple ID, and there is a Token Event API method for /event/{id}/poaps that would get exactly what is desired. The URL’s for an event are https://poap.gallery/drops/{eventid}, my 53rd Birthday POAP is at https://poap.gallery/drops/183305 is an example.
In this case, the eventid is easily found and using the API could get the data to populate the RSS feed.
Addresses
Getting an RSS feed for new tokens that people claim is centered around a wallet address. Here we are looking for an address or ENS name. An example of this is my collection at https://collectors.poap.xyz/scan/0x111accebf9d70d9c06de2d38f9392522e82ecf29. This can also be accessed via the ENS name at https://collectors.poap.xyz/scan/poap.thingelstad.eth.
The Token Scan API method /actions/scan/{address} returns the list of tokens for that address and could build the RSS feed.
Shabby Road Orchestra at The Dakota
Tammy and I joined my Mom and Kurt tonight at The Dakota for Shabby Road Orchestra. The show was billed as “faithful performances of Beatles classics” and it delivered. The show was a Christmas present for my Mom who is a big fan of the Beatles, and really we all enjoy their amazing catalog.
We had never seen Shabby Road Orchestra, and I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the show exceeded my expectations. It was a lot of fun, the performance was great, and it was overall just a great night. I recommend checking this out if you get a chance.
It was also the most people I’ve ever seen on the small stage at The Dakota. The 12-piece Shabby Road Orchestra is:
- Adam Levy (guitars, vocals)
- John Eller (guitars, vocals)
- Joe Carey (guitars, vocals)
- Brandon Sampson (guitars, vocals)
- John Fields (bass)
- Ken Chastain (drums, vocals)
- Tom Scott (keys, percussion, sound effects)
- Paul Scott (keys)
- David Foley (horns, woodwinds)
- Andy Nelson (woodwinds)
- John Sievers (trombone)
- Jacqueline Ultan (cello)
We see Ken Chastain play frequently with The New Standards. We’ve seen The Honeydogs a few times and seen Adam Levy with them. We weren’t sure of the show but know we’ve seen David Foley and Andy Nelson play before. They even had someone come out and play a Sitar for three of the songs.
First time at Le Burger 4304. We all agreed the fries were great. Burgers were very good with Jamie liking the most. We ordered doubles and should have gotten singles. Very busy. Will be back. 🍔
Trying to Clout Coffee Bourbon Whiskey barrel-aged espresso this morning. Strong Bourbon smell on the beans.
All five of the Weekly Thing Christmas Blogs are now created!
- Phil Rodemann @See3p0
- Marcos D Alves @mdalves
- David O’Hara @davoh
- Jesse Lang @jesselang
- Eric Cohn @ercohn
Next step is to introduce each of these blogs to Weekly Thing readers over a few issues. Love that “new blog” smell! 😂
I’ve been sharing my 53rd Birthday POAP with friends and family all day today. I thought it would be fun to share a few with readers of my blog.
We had a fun visit to Bell Museum this morning. We saw Mars: The Ultimate Voyage in the Planetarium and then checked out all the dioramas.
It’s my birthday tomorrow! Noting my rings and version number the day before. 😊
I’ll be sharing my 53rd Birthday POAP. Want one? Just ask.
We watched Fly Me to the Moon tonight and I thought it was a great movie. Tammy liked it too and Tyler was a bit bored. Enjoyable movie with a fun story all in the context of the Apollo program and landing on the moon!
POAP Event Trends
It has become a tradition for me to create a POAP for my birthday. I’ve been doing it since my 50th Birthday and now have 51st, 52nd, and now my 53rd. Since POAP uses a simple sequential number for events I can easily see how many POAP events have been created for those years.
| Year (Approx) | Events |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 74,298 |
| 2023 | 71,285 |
| 2024 | 16,826 |
That is a big drop in 2024, however it is still 46 events a day. I love what POAP is doing and they are slowly getting their whole offering easier to use and more streamlined. My guess is that they are not actively pushing to create more events right now while they improve the product. I’m rooting for them to be massively successful. I think POAP could be one of the products that shows the path for blockchain adoption.
I’m “all in” on micro.blog collections. I have 61 collections with 936 images. My Collection Creator Shortcut was key to that. Nearly all Gallery posts have been updated. I migrated Adaptive Photo Layout posts to Collections.
Top feature ask: rename collections and modify order or images.
2024 in Blogging
With many thanks to Amit Gawande’s fun Post Stats Plugin and a recent discussion to add some more information to it — I’m sharing some perspective on my blogging from 2024.
In 2024 I published 701 posts with 51,905 words. Of those, 529 had photos and 157 of them had titles.
June had about triple the normal blogging activity which was from our trip to Ireland. Over the last few years I’ve done daily travel logs on those trips and usually write a blog post for each activity. It can be a lot, but I value what it creates and know that in future years I will revisit those posts with many fond memories.
Zooming out I now have a total of 9,111 posts containing 574,102 words! My blog posts have come along many migrations:
.Text → WordPress → SquareSpace → Pelican → Jekyll → micro.blog
On top of that I imported my Twitter archive and curated and improved that. Since April 2017 I’ve been publishing on micro.blog and you can see that it has enabled me to post even more. To me, this is one of the best ways to evaluate a blogging platform — does it enable you to “just write” on the web.
Happy 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣! 🎉🥂 Wishing everyone a great New Year!
It was Mr. Green with the Revolver in the Hall. Tammy won!
