Everyone's a Syndicate | RSS/Atom Reader widget for your website
tl;dr: go to here and put a widget on your website. If you want to look at the source code, it's available here
Update 2024-12-20: Added on-blog-page examples.
In the last weeks of Cohost a lot of energy was put into promoting 3 kinds of "old internet" discovery tools: 88x31 badges, webrings, and RSS/Atom feeds. I like these things, and I use these things, but they all have constraints. 88x31 badges require some working graphic design knowledge to get done and don't give much information, a webring is a consensus system that is hard to add to once you've already established a set of members, and RSS/Atom feeds require installing a reader on something and that something is usually separate from the rest of your Web Browsing Experience.
I am sick of having opinions about or on social media. One of these opinions is "If someone goes on a webpage, they want that page to be connected to other webpages", which I think is a reasonable observation. It's the basis of the web, after all.
Another opinion I'm sick of having is "People don't want to click through on minimal information". An 88x31 badge is cute, but it is a very small image with very little information on it. If you're lucky, you can fit your moniker on it, and even then you might not have room to spare.
A final opinion is "People tend to not have RSS readers, and will not install one if you tell them to." which I think is, again, reasonable. Feed readers are clunky, expensive, or both. Every year it feels like I'm getting a worse experience using one.
This can be solved by putting an RSS/Atom reader in your own website. But browsers enforce CORS, so you'd need a service to deal with that kind of thing. Or at the very least a proxy. I don't want to know about these things, but unfortunately I do. So I've gone ahead and tried to make it so you don't have to.
I have made a service to deal with this kind of thing. It also offers an RSS/Atom-only CORS proxy. You can put your pals on your website. A kind of passive reblog-all from them. A mix between a webring and an RSS reader. Imply the real connections between you and others. Put your trust in them.
Here's a reader for a bunch of cohost users:
And another for Scottish Game Devs:
There's a couple of neat features, like "equal shuffle" which means everyone's most recent posts will be shuffled together and displayed. and then their second most recent. Then their third, etc. This has an advantage over pure reverse chronological view because people who post a lot will get the same amount of space at the top of the reader widget as the people who post infrequently. You can, of course, still use reverse chronological if you want to.
I do not like posting about technology, and this is not my End of 2024 blog post. I will be posting that another time. And if I'm lucky it'll show up on other people's websites, with some help from this tool.