Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz in my tech bubble about good old RSS/Atom feeds. Not only are people rediscovering them and making them available on their blogs, but new services are also popping up around this 30-year-old technology. It’s just so wonderfully independent and fits the trend of moving away from increasingly terrible platforms at the protocol level and returning to the free, open internet.

A good example of this is, of course, my new daily companion Bubbles by Ben, but also initiatives like Sourcefeed by Terry Godier, which rely on RSS-based content publishing WITHOUT a dedicated website. Write, Feed, done.

Terry recently published another project that Ben had addressed in a similar way a few days earlier. Ben’s was about integrating a Fediverse address into the commenting process on Bubbles via a meta tag on one’s own blog. In other words, enriching the posts extracted from the feed with additional information about the blogger.

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As I wrote recently, I Love Bubbles. The new blog post aggregator (based on the RSS feeds of a curated list of blogs) has become part of my morning routine: making coffee, browsing my blogroll, opening Bubbles, and discovering new posts from blogs I’ve never heard of before — though that’s about to change ;)

Since my blog is also included in Bubbles’ list — and I imagine others are in the same boat — I suspect the reach of my posts will increase somewhat. Previously, I could only achieve this by manually syndicating my posts, primarily on Mastodon and IndieNews, and my photos on Vernissage and Pixelfed.

Now Bubbles helps me on that, by automatically syndicating its entry to its own GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse. And of course, I’m interested in bringing the interactions with my post, that accumulate there, back to my site, just as I already do with the other platforms through my Mentions United project. That’s why there’s now a new Bubbles plugin …

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Any new way of interconnecting websites and users on the IndieWeb is not only welcome but also vital for a stable counterbalance to Big Tech’s shitty walled gardens. Yesterday I stumbled across a really good and new one, that integrates also the Fediverse: Bubbles from Ben.

We monitor thousands of independent, personal blogs via RSS. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically. Nobody submits individual links.The blogs were hand-picked from various curated sources and individually reviewed.

There are currently around 5,000 blogs and I was surprised to find my own among them.

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It was time to see Versengold again… and for the first time in my hometown of Wiesbaden. It’s great when it only takes a 10-minute bus ride to see your favorite band.

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I’m 57 and currently hooked on stickers, and AI isn’t entirely innocent in this, combined with a bit of a guilty conscience - but it’s a lot of fun.

I recently “retired” my old business laptop after just two short years, with a battery life of 28 minutes after a full charge, and somehow I felt sorry, because the best thing about that otherwise junk of a Dell laptop was the lid with the stickers (see header image). Everything started with the “truck” in the middle, which ended up on my desk one day and seemed to be yelling, “Stick me on your laptop!”

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It seems like fate that James chose Museum Memories as topic of this month’s Indieweb Carnival, because just recently, by chance, I visited one of the most impressive places from my childhood after more than 40 years: the Deutsches Museum in Munich. My wife and I had traveled to the Bavarian capital for a rock concert by the band Alter Bridge and actually planned to spend the rest of the weekend enjoying the city’s atmosphere, but as February in Germany sometimes goes, the weather was, to put it mildly, lousy, and my wife came up with the idea of going to the museum.

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It’s not every day that one of our favourite bands tours Germany and brings along guests that we like just as much. We last saw Alter Bridge in Frankfurt 2016 and had never seen Daughtry before. So there was no question about whether we would go to Munich. Of course we would. And since the concert was on Friday evening, it was also the perfect opportunity to enjoy beautiful Munich for a weekend.

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When I read about this month’s Indieweb Carnival topic (Intersecting Interests by Zachary Kai), I initially misunderstood ‘intersecting’ as interests that cross paths and thus get in the way, but what is meant is rather overlapping interests. As a non-native English speaker, I lack a feel for the nuances of the language. But basically, it doesn’t matter, because I knew immediately what I wanted to write about, and my interests actually include both aspects: contrary and complementary.

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