In the realm of personal websites, one staple furniture is a links page (called "blogroll" when said website was a blog) which the webmaster would put a big list of links to other websites or specific web pages of his interest, so visitors finishing reading his website could glance on and discover more of what to read and see in the same alley or similar taste.
Links pages, as you already know, are usually perpetual work in progress, with new links occasionally be added on the whim of webmaster; so as a visitor, it means that if you would like to see new entries which got added on your favorite website's links page, you would have to regularly visit that page to check.
(1) Tedious, but doable if you got dedication;
(2) but that gotta be a way to make this easier for people to do, isn't it?
When following updates across personal websites, I trust that many people here know of small Internet "follow" tool: feed readers. However, virtually all the web feeds on personal websites out there are for following the new pages that the webmaster added, not the individual new link that he added on an already-existing links page.
And even in rare cases where Atom/RSS feed was actually provided for tracking changes within links page (3), virtually
all of them I've seen
would be formatted in a way unsuitable for using feed reader as
links aggregator. Instead of directly seeing individual link text as headlines in a feed reader, I would only see something like boilerplate "Modified at YYYY-MM-DD" or revision message like "Adding more links"; and each headline would merely be linking back to the links page itself (not useful), or the revision diff page (requires manual copy-paste to go to the URL added); not ideal at all.
As someone who hand-code personal websites, and have been hand-typing Atom feed on one of them;
I decided to re-read the Atom specification and devised something better: instead of making a feed to record each changes-through-time of the HTML links page,
make this feed a links page itself-- by making each entry in the feed (title, summary, link, category) exactly the same as ones on the original HTML version; the differences merely being that this Atom-formatted "links page" is arranged in flat reverse-chronological order, and each entry being time-stamped.
This results in an Atom feed linked in this HTML version of
my links page: (4)https://xwindows.in.th/links/^ You would find a link to an Atom feed version
(5) at the end of the introduction paragraphs.
When plopping Atom feed of that page into a feed reader, it would magically turn the feed reader into an automatic personal links aggregator
(6):
Neat use of a universal small-Internet "follow" tool, right?
(7)And since it's a feed reader, you're allowed to set up arbitrary filtering, do local searching, mark-read links you have explored, or remove links you decided no longer wanting to see; all by yourself, away from meddling tentacles of AI-gorithm and prying corporate eyes...
But I also wonder:
why didn't I see any other people make this feed for their links pages, (8) like... at all, despite that the technology behind it have been well-known for decades? Maybe it was just my limited experience of the Internet; so
if you see other people make their links page feed that makes feed reader work like links aggregator I just described (or you decided to make one),
feel free to pitch in and link them below.
(1) Bonus point if the webmaster thought of noting the last-updated date on the page, noting the latest link added, or have an additional list of latest links added by date somewhere in that links page.
(2) Technically, it can be less tedious when you use external page-tracking service that monitors the change and create Atom/RSS feed for you; but it will be plagued with the same set of issues I'm elaborating later on.
(3) For example, if the website in question was powered by wiki-style CMS: individual Atom feed would often be provided for tracking changes of each individual pages, as well as another for global changes.
(4) In a spirit of legacy-first design, my personal website is HTTP/HTTPS dual-served; feel free to remove `s` from the protocol if you need or want. Plain olde HTTP version of the links page (whether HTML or Atom format) will also feature HTTP version of each link when available. (
Reasons Not to Buy From Amazon,
Wiby,
WWWorst App Store,
Motherfucking Website, and the first installment of
A Vernacular Web are specifically linked via HTTP on that version)
(5) I'm intentionally not posting a direct link to Atom feed here, due to scraper reasons.
(6) Theoretically, if you followed several links pages of this format with a more-sophisticated feed reader, you could even create your own Links Aggregator Master-Feed that displays all links gathered on that entire set of feeds, in a single list as if it was a one big feed too.
(7) There is one quirk on my Atom-formatted link page though: the notion of entry's author in Atom feed does not have distinction between author of summary text vs. entry curator vs. author of the actual URL pointed. The way I opted to write this feed resulted in my name appearing as an author of each linked URL though I intended to mean "this link is collected, summarized, and brought to your attention by..."
(8) Before anyone start arguing that feed was supposed/intended to carry full content rather than just headings: that's simply untrue. Anyone who doubt this would need to look no further than the original release of RSS specification:
RSS 0.90-- could you see any tag for entry content/summary there? There wasn't any, because RSS started out as a distribution mechanism of mere
news headings and its links. While I'm technically using Atom here, I'm basically using web feed for its
original purpose.
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