Links, tags, and feeds
A little while back, I switched from using Chrome as my day-to-day browser to using Firefox. I could feel myself getting a bit too comfortable with one particular browser, and that’s not good. I reckon it’s good to shake things up a little every now and then. Besides, there really isn’t that much difference once you’ve transferred over bookmarks and cookies.
Unfortunately I’m being bitten by this little bug in Firefox. It causes some of my bookmarklets to fail on certain sites with strict Content Security Policies (and CSPs shouldn’t affect bookmarklets). I might have to switch back to Chrome because of this.
I use bookmarklets throughout the day. There’s the Huffduffer bookmarklet, of course, for whenever I come across a podcast episode or other piece of audio that I want to listen to later. But there’s also my own home-rolled bookmarklet for posting links to my site. It doesn’t do anything clever — it grabs the title and URL of the currently open page and pre-populates a form in a new window, leaving me to add a short description and some tags.
If you’re reading this, then you’re familiar with the “journal” section of adactio.com, but the “links” section is where I post the most. Here, for example, are all the links I posted yesterday. It varies from day to day, but there’s generally a handful.
Should you wish to keep track of everything I’m linking to, there’s a twitterbot you can follow called @adactioLinks. It uses a simple IFTTT recipe to poll my RSS feed of links and send out a tweet whenever there’s a new entry.
Or you can drink straight from the source and subscribe to the RSS feed itself, if you’re still rocking it old-school. But if RSS is your bag, then you might appreciate a way to filter those links…
All my links are tagged. Heavily. This is because all my links are “notes to future self”, and all my future self has to do is ask “what would past me have tagged that link with?” when I’m trying to find something I previously linked to. I end up using my site’s URLs as an interface:
At the front-end gatherings at Clearleft, I usually wrap up with a quick tour of whatever I’ve added that week to:
Well, each one of those tags also has a corresponding RSS feed:
adactio.com/links/tags/serviceworkers/rssadactio.com/links/tags/sci-fi/rssadactio.com/links/tags/frontend/rss
…and so on.
That means you can subscribe to just the links tagged with something you’re interested in. Here’s the full list of tags if you’re interested in seeing the inside of my head.
This also works for my journal entries. If you’re only interested in my blog posts about frontend development, you might want to subscribe to:
Here are all the tags from my journal.
You can even mix them up. For everything I’ve tagged with “typography” — whether it’s links, journal entries, or articles — the URL is:
The corresponding RSS feed is:
You get the idea. Basically, if something on my site is a list of items, chances are there’s a corresponding RSS feeds. Sometimes there might even be a JSON feed. Hack some URLs to see.
Meanwhile, I’ll be linking, linking, linking…
This was originally posted on my own site.
