browser.blogroll.social is up

[scripting]

I've been working on a project for the last couple of weeks to see what's out there in the Land of Blogrolls, since Manton and I did our little push a couple of months ago.

https://browse.blogroll.social/

So I set out to write some software that would crawl the blogrolls I could find, starting with my blogroll, and then looking at each feed to see if I could find a blogroll linked into it.

That meant going from the htmlUrl link in an outline node and looking for a link to a blogroll.

I found about 25 blogrolls, give or take, there were some duplicates, ie two URLs to the same list. We're going to have to figure out what to do about that.

My software crawls the structure periodically, once every 10 minutes -- so if you make a change to your blogroll, it should be reflected pretty quickly.

I think we will feel blogrolls a lot more than they used to be. A very loose structure for network-building all outside the silos. This is what I hoped we'd be doing with OPML when it started, in 2000, now maybe we're getting there.

Since it revolves around OPML, I thought it would be good to talk about it here.

[scripting]

One thing I want to point out is that each blogroll has an address.

https://browse.blogroll.social/?blogrollUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fdanq.me%2Fblogroll.xml&blogrollTitle=Dan%20Q%27s%20Blogroll

I'm going to make that shorter, but for now that's how you can point to a specific blogroll in this context.

DanQ's blogroll is one of the best out there, btw, imho of course.

[colin-walker]

Discovery has long been an issue with blogs. We took a huge backwards step with the mass adoption of (and reliance on) social media which killed the likes of Digg and Technorati.

As I always say, what better recommendation is there than the blogs you read yourself — returning to blogrolls as a loose network can solve so many issues in such a simple way with minimal changes to a standard OPML.

[scripting]

@colin-walker --

i totally agree. and we can build all kinds of structures from the network of blogrolls linking to other blogrolls through the link in the HTML and RSS.

BTW, only one feed has a link to its blogroll (mine) so I'm only using the HTML linkage to determine if a site has a blogroll.

I get to the HTML page via the htmlUrl attribute on the <outline> element.

This is the kind of discovery system I wished we had in place in 2000 when we first started using OPML. But we're here now, and there's enough of a beginning to perhaps start a bootstrap that grows like blogs did, then feeds, then podcasts.

It make a huge difference that Manton is working on this too, btw.

[scripting]

I did some work on cosmetics this morning.

https://browse.blogroll.social/

1. The title of the page changed from We Heart Blogrolls to Blogroll Browser.

2. The columns line up better.

3. There's a link to this thread in the explainer.

I'm starting to think about linking up to other behind-the-scenes resources.

For example, there's a fresh instance of FeedLand running behind this, so all the blogrolls are also reading lists, and they have associated rivers. That should all work (haven't looked yet).

1. We have to get titles on all the OPML files. That's the first thing @colin-walker noticed.

2. Why is Manton's list showing up twice.

3. I want people to see this. I haven't posted it on Scripting News yet or micro.blog (I plan to post something there too).

[colin-walker]

I'm going to be posting about it today as well.

[colin-walker]

@scripting I see that Kev Quirk's is listed twice as well.

[scripting]

How to view the OPML behind each blogroll.

[scripting]

Shortcut to a specific blogroll.

1. Click on the list in the left panel.
2. Copy the URL from the address bar.
3. Bookmark the URL or send to a friend.

An example.

[manton]

Looking good. One minor typo: "it tooks a surprisingly long time"

As more blogrolls are found, it might be interesting to have a special section at the top, something like "5 blogrolls and 15 blogs found in the last month". Something to highlight that it's discovering new blogs. Just an idea.

[scripting]

I hooked up the View in FeedLand command in the popup menu in the blogroll.

When you choose the command, you'll switch into zero.blogroll.social (I know it's a weird name, probably will change), and view the river of news for that blogroll.

[scripting]

@manton -- good to see you here!

I doubt this is going to be the final form of the blogroll browser, or if a blogroll browser even makes sense.

It's just something I threw together quickly to get an idea of how much is going on here.

And by having this browser here, hopefully it will cause people to do more with their blogrolls, and this is just the first of many ways of navigating the network of blogrolls.

It's sort of like the coral reef concept. I don't have much of a desire to run this long term, but I figured if I didn't do it, it would be a long time coming.

[scripting]

BTW, @colin-walker --

I know View List in FeedLand doesn't work with your list.

I think it's probably due to the extra level of nesting in the outline, but I haven't been able to get to that place in the debugger to see what FL does with it.

I want you to know it's on my list.

[colin-walker]

@scripting I can remove the nesting if it's not strictly valid.

[scripting]

@colin-walker — it’s totally valid to have nesting.

you could try removing the nesting just to help me see if that’s the problem.

[colin-walker]

@scripting Done.