In this WP Tavern episode, host Nathan Wrigley interviews software pioneer Dave Winer, a key figure behind technologies like RSS and podcasting. Winer reflects on the early idealism of the web, the rise of walled gardens, and why open and interoperable platforms matter. He discusses his latest project, “Wordland,” which leverages WordPress and markdown to…
In one of the most apropos uses of a .blog domain, Refined.blog is a new website that promotes personal blogging with a curated list of software engineering blogs. It’s a simple site with an index of blogs, their Hacker News scores, tags, and a link to each blog’s RSS feed. The search function is very…
The internet was set abuzz yesterday after Google officially confirmed that it has been testing a Follow button for websites in Chrome. In February, the publishers of Chrome Story spotted the button on Canary for Android, and speculated that it may be integrated with Google’s Discover feature. Chrome announced that it is building on RSS…
Chrome Canary, the browser’s nightly build for developers, has been testing a new Follow button, as spotted on Android by the publishers of Chrome Story. The button appears on the homepage of a site, as well as in the browser menu: Chrome Story speculates that it may be integrated with Google’s Discover feature, allowing sites…
JSON Feed, a project created by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons, launched last week. It’s a syndication format similar to RSS and Atom but built with JSON. “The premise was simple: the time is right for a JSON-based approach to feeds,” Reece said. “We hope that JSON Feed is straightforward enough to be implemented quickly,…
When Google Reader was laid to rest on July 1, 2013, many users flocked to Feedly, one of the most popular alternatives. Even if you don’t use Feedly, it’s likely that many of your blog’s readers do. Therefore, if you want a true picture of the number of your RSS subscribers, digging into Feedly’s numbers…
When Google Reader was shut down on July 2nd, 2013, those who use RSS searched far and wide for suitable replacements. I’ve settled on using Feedly for my needs. However, there is a plugin available that adds an RSS reader to WordPress so you can create blog posts as you read RSS feeds from within…
After the rush of listing a theme or plugin on WordPress.org, the reality of providing support will soon set in. The best way to stay in touch with your user base is to subscribe to the support forums, since that’s the first place people generally go when looking for answers. Subscription options vary, depending on…
With the impending shutdown of Google Reader on July 1st, I’ve been looking for Feedreader alternatives. I happened to stumble across a recently developed plugin called PressForward. Developed for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University by Aram Zucker-Scharff, Boone B. Gorges, and Jeremy Boggs, PressForward provides…
Jean-Baptiste Jung has a good blog post over at The Blog Herald that questions whether FeedBurner is still relevant. In the post, Jean examines how in the past month, his numbers if varied widely. As a long time user of FeedBurner, I too have seen numbers vary wildly with no explanation. By the way, it’s…
Over the weekend, some big news was published on the SimplePie development blog where it was announced that development for the RSS Parser would cease effective immediately. While the first version of SimplePie was built ontop of MagpieRSS, it quickly became the de-facto RSS/Atom parsing software for PHP. WordPress uses SimplePie to parse the RSS…
A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg announced on the WordPress.com blog that they had enabled support for something called RSS cloud. RSS cloud may seem new, but support for it in the RSS 2.0 specification has been around for a long time. Since 2001 to be exact. However, the RSS feed for WordPress did not…
I just wanted to let everyone know that the issues involved with the RSS feed have been fixed. Michael Torbert is helping me create a custom post submission form to allow me to easily take on guest blog posts. In the initial plugin, a bit of code caused the XML in the RSS feed to…
Over the course of this past weekend, I migrated content from one domain to another. My biggest concern regarding the migration was all of the backlinks that the site had received plus the Search Engine pointers which would exist for some time to come. Thankfully, I discovered two things which made the migration very easy.…