Long-form blogging syndication technologies for 2018

gaekwad · 2018-01-21 15:10:13

I’m returning to long-form personal and professional blogging after a many years off/away. I intend, initially, to follow the Just Write And Hit Publish approach, and (re)learn as I go.

However. One question in the back of my mind relates to syndication. I am under no illusion that my writing will be any better or worse than any others, but I am keen to make sure those who read blogs regularly (or, perhaps more accurately, in preference to social media feeds) have the mechanisms to plug my stuff into their stuff, should my words be of interest to them, with the least resistance.

There’s RSS. There’s Atom. Those are well-known to me, having been around for a while, and they work. There’s Open Graph and schema.org for metadata that provides a platform to share. There are all sorts of other things out there…and I’m not sure what to offer technology-wise.

What sharing/syndication technologies are worth looking into for a 2018 blogger, please? I’m especially curious what reading tool(s) you use if you’re a long-form reader.

Thank you for your time.

jakob · 2018-01-21 22:41:22

This is not really a qualified answer to your question. Rss is/was my preferred channel, but as I gradually bookmarked more for reading (I don’t go overboard but…), the more I fell behind and the more it became distracting / time-consuming, so in the end I use it less and less. Clearing out the feeds works, but then you discover all those wonderful things you’ve been meaning to read and haven’t … ;-) Sometimes even a good-ol (non-advertising) email like Mike Monteiro’s tinyletter missives can be effective at putting something under my nose.

I’m not a blog-writer / author myself, so can’t comment on pulling in other content, and also not a big social media user or consumer.

I’m not helping much, I guess. What I really wanted to say is that I have enjoyed reading what you have to say :-)

gaekwad · 2018-01-21 22:45:48

jakob wrote #308797:

This is not really a qualified answer to your question. Rss is/was my preferred channel, but as I gradually bookmarked more for reading (I don’t go overboard but…), the more I fell behind and the more it became distracting / time-consuming, so in the end I use it less and less. Clearing out the feeds works, but then you discover all those wonderful things you’ve been meaning to read and haven’t … ;-) Sometimes even a good-ol (non-advertising) email like Mike Monteiro’s tinyletter missives can be effective at putting something under my nose.

Man, it’s like you’re in my head. I had hundreds of things in my Safari/iCloud reading list and it was overwhelming. A day of culling and I got it down to 50, and I’m now down to, I dunno, 20?

I’m not helping much, I guess. What I really wanted to say is that I have enjoyed reading what you have to say :-)

You absolutely are helping! And thank you, you are kind.

From my prosumer point of view, I see so many tools appearing to improve the creation workflow of websites, but far less in the syndication side of things.

Maybe that’s the answer…stick with the classics. JSON be damned, etc.

towndock · 2018-01-21 23:46:41

One man’s opinion:

RSS feeds are a foreign concept to almost all potential readers. Focus on your own site, making it a compelling place to visit.

Do make it easy to share on major social media platforms. We find most articles get little social media activity, but some get significant sharing. While I find social media mostly vacuous, as a publisher I realize much of our audience also uses social media. A few more inbound links is great.

Still, most of our traffic is organic. Readers choose to visit, and visit again. For our little publication (4 to 5 thousand visits daily, 15 to 20 thousand page views daily) that is the ideal situation.

gaekwad · 2018-01-21 23:47:46

Thanks, towndock – much appreciated!

michaelkpate · 2018-01-22 00:38:17

I was actually thinking of this the other day. I avidly followed the RSS and ATOM standards efforts years ago.

But honestly, I get most of my news these days from Twitter, Google News, and SmartNews on my phone. I still have my Feedly account but never check it anymore.

It may help with syndication but is probably dead as far as consumers.

phiw13 · 2018-01-22 08:37:53

I still use my feed reader extensively, but probably not in a way that most people would – to follow news. I follow a few sites that publish something new quite infrequently, but that something is mostly worth the ways, long-form writings. Most items in my feed reader are to keep track of commits to some GitHub projects, bug reports and the like.

Like michaelkpate, I suspect syndication is dead for most consumers.

gaekwad · 2018-01-22 13:56:02

Thanks, Michael and Philippe – I appreciate it!

Destry · 2018-01-26 10:04:48

As a “wall of text” writer myself getting back to serious writing, I’ve been mulling questions like this (and others) quite a bit lately. I’ll just dump this out in no particular fashion…

First, I’ve been finding I need to approach the drafting (what application do I use to edit this monster?) and distribution (how am I going to make this available to readers?) sides of the question at the same time, especially when dealing with long-form, or you can really spin your wheels with a lot of tear-inducing formatting (depending how particular you are at the typography-as-design level, which I am fairly anal about).

That leads to the related question: Is this essay destined to be HTML, a different format, both? Because while I believe people do read online, even long-form, I also believe they read more when long content is offered in different ways, such as ePub. And if the content is visuals-heavy, then ePub is perhaps looking even better, especially as it gets more important to publish lighter web pages. People can put ePubs in their reading device of choice and read it whether online or off.

But if you want both HTML docs and ePUbs, that’s taking the drafting considerations to a more complex level. For example, iA Writer and the like are great for HTML docs, but Pages or Scrivner, as two examples, are a better choice for tackling ePubs. So do you draft/format the damn thing twice? Aaaaahhhh!

The old-school content strategy folks (i.e. tech writers) would tell us that content must be free of any kind of formatting so that it can be output using XSLT to any publication type we want from a single source. DITA and that shite. They’re right, but they’re also talking about system setups that cost a ton of money and suited to big orgs.

So it comes back to knowing who you’re writing for and why. If you know who you’re writing for then you’ll know where they’re at and thus what format of distribution is best.

You could also think of it by length of content (and again, amount of visual elements). If by long-form you mean between 1,500 and 3,000 words (middle-form), then that’s probably HTML worthy if not to image heavy. But if you’re writing tech manuals or novellas, then ePubs are probably better and more likely to be read. And if they’re good and regular, you might even make some chicken scratch from them via Liberpay readership or something.

I’m working on something now that’s grown beyond long-form. It’s not a book length but it’s not practical web long-form anymore either. So I’ve ported the thing to Scrivner to finish the drafting. If I can’t find a publisher to take it from there, I can easily output it to a word processor like Pages (compatible formatting, rich text) and clean it up as an ePub from there. Sure, there are different ways to the doghouse, but the fact is, some tools are designed to make life easier.

As for syndication… I see a lot of people in Mastodon bemoaning the slow decay of RSS. Even interesting websites that write good content are hard-pressed to add convenient RSS links on their sites anymore. It’s a bit sad. But maybe not too late. I’m like Jakob, I use a feed reader, but it just fills up with blog posts I never actually read. That’s mostly a lack of time, though. Which is a valid consideration for people.

With RSS, and especially with respect to long-form, you might have this question: Do I give them the first 500 words or the whole enchilada and make them come to my site for more. Some feed readers force it short regardless. Or, like Reeder, I notice, pulls the full article into a Frame, so it doesn’t even really treat the full article as a feed. That’s kind of stupid. That’s just giving the signal that you might as well go to the website to begin with.

Which brings us to the website… I don’t mind reading middle-form on a website if the reading experience is really good. A lot of good writers can’t craft that visual presentation though. So in that case the browser’s built-in Reader View is great. I love Reader View. It make any shitty website fantastic in a blink. ;)

Leave out the ads, tracking, and other shit-injections. You don’t win readers over with that stuff right from the start.

There’s no clear or simple answer. Just try a few things and see what sticks. But I find that I’m losing desire to what to tinker in front-ends all the time. In fact I have no desire for it anymore. I just want to write and edit and publish, and have it look half beautiful. I’ll go the distance with markup if I have too, but this is why things like Medium (blah) and other more grassroots efforts like Write.as are popular. They give an easy place to write and publish with a decent reading experience. Easy-peasy.

Bloke · 2018-01-26 10:31:51

Not wishing to derail this thread, but as a fellow long-former and now full-time document publisher in my day job (MS Word for now: bleah! The search continues for something better…) the preparation, building and distribution of (tech) documentation from topics, for different audiences, is interesting to me.

I’ve downloaded Scrivener but haven’t played with it yet. Seems more suited for creative writing and screenplays (which is good for me anyway) but the fact you can shuffle topics around as index cards and have everything auto renumbered might be a boon. Frustrated by the lack of usable DITA-ish software out there that I could afford, I also started writing my own doc publishing system in Txp, btw. Got quite far, not finished yet.

But I recently stumbled across Pollen which is intriguing to me. The back-story is a good read, but the bottom line is it’s a document publishing system that’s a) scriptable, b) uses Markdown, c) could be hacked to use any other markup language, and d) can output the copy in any damn format you like with a simple command… mmm sounds gooooood. A panacea, with chocolate frosting: write once, publish many, for varying audiences.

Although Pollen’s targeted at ePub and digital books, could one of those audiences be the people who want to publish / consume syndicated content as a subset of the full article? I think so…

Last edited by Bloke (2018-01-26 10:33:54)

gaekwad · 2018-01-26 11:08:46

Destry wrote #308888:

There’s no clear or simple answer. Just try a few things and see what sticks.

Destry – thank you very much, always insightful and great value for money. Much obliged, sir.

etc · 2018-01-26 11:10:56

Bloke wrote #308893:

a document publishing system that’s a) scriptable, b) uses Markdown, c) could be hacked to use any other markup language, and d) can output the copy in any damn format you like with a simple command… mmm sounds gooooood. A panacea, with chocolate frosting: write once, publish many, for varying audiences.

Textpattern is not far from it, you can output articles in any damn format you like with rah_external output. And even without in 4.7, though that’s a secret Easter egg.

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#1 2018-01-21 15:10:13