The web has not gotten nearly the respect it deserves as a writing environment. It's been crippled by neglect, greed, complacency and cynicism. And jealousy -- professional writers are contemptuous of the idea of amateurs writing brilliantly. But it's not too late.#
A couple of minor but nice tweaks to yesterday's HowTo thanks to a suggestion from Joseph Zitt. #
BTW, this was the first time I wrote one of these HowTos that is part prose and part code. I love the way it turned out. I didn't plan on talking to feed reader devs on behalf of writers, but I think we all need to focus on who we're doing all this for, and it's primarily writers imho and then readers, and to the extent that programmers matter, it's just teeeny little bit. If this were a restaurant, we've designed things solely from the point of view of waiters, ignoring chefs and diners. That's how far off course we've gotten. We value tech too much esp when tech has done such a bad job as we have in feed reading user experience. #
No wonder the writing and reading environment of the web in 2022 is so awful. We ignore the writers and the readers. Every time one of us speaks up, we get a chorus of agreement from other writers and readers, and then totally ignored by the developers. One example I'm constantly reminded of, because I often read the NYT on my iPad, it always interrupts my reading to put up a dialog asking if I want to read the article in their app. Even worse, they wait long enough so that I have already started reading the article. It's as if they want me to hate them. They say the app is much better. Well, I don't want to do that, for good reason, and it's none of their freaking business but there's no way to turn this dialog off. I pay them a lot of money to read their articles. And every time I open one of their stories on my iPad I'm reminded how much they hate me, and vice versa. #
Talking with a friend who uses FeedLand today, the question came up as to how you find new feeds that might be interesting. So here are a few ways.#
If you don't want to do a lot of work, start with my feed list. I subscribe to a lot of feeds, more than anyone else. Now here's the cool part. If you see a checkbox that isn't checked that means you aren't subscribed to it. Just click on the checkbox to subscribe. #
Start with a feed you like, on your Feed List page. Screen shot. Click on the title of the feed, which takes you to the Feed Info page. At the end of the page is a list of other people who subscribe to that feed. Click on a name to see their Feed List page. #
Choose Recent users from the first menu. It takes you to a list of users who have recently used FeedLand. Screen shot. Click on any name to go to their feed list. There are the checkboxes again. You can play with the sort order on the Recent Users page, you can see the people who have used FeedLand the most (that's the Hits colum) or are subscribed to the most feeds (the Ct column) or have been using it the longest (click twice on the Started column). #
Watching Musk torment Fauci is a warning to all of us. Never mind why he's doing it, it doesn't matter. What matters is he's doing it. #
Organizing insurrection aimed at random individuals and their families. When it's your turn, there's nowhere to run.#
Keep your head down little citizen. It doesn't matter if you're Speaker Pelosi or a highly respected medical man.#
He's the man with all the power, you could be next.#
Last update: Monday December 19, 2022; 2:32 PM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
