A Place For Everything

If you're a programmer of a certain age, you've either read or know about Design Patterns, a book on software architecture popular in the 90s and early 2000's. The book was sort of like a repository of TV tropes for the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) world in that it provided a convenient vocabulary for describing what were usually eminently recognizable software engineering techniques that nonetheless often lacked punchy, easy to remember names.

Notably, the book was more descriptive than prescriptive. It described preexisting techniques that were already in use in the "wild", so to speak.

The IndieWeb community has performed a similar service with online content. It used to be that the web was filled with blogs and websites, and that was that. Then came the rise of social media, and people suddenly started posting things like status updates and tweets - frequent, short, titleless bits of content as opposed to the titled, long-form content that characterized traditional blogs. And while you could, as before, comment on those tweets with your own zingers (forming a class of content unto itself) you weren't restricted to that alone; now you could also like those tweets and share them with other people.

The web, in other words, had moved beyond the venerable blog post. It wasn't just that more and more online content was being walled off into less and less services (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). It was that people were now posting different kinds of things.

So the IndieWeb community, like the authors of Design Patterns, took a step back and did their best to identify what was happening in the wild. It came up with the following categorization scheme:

• Articles. Your standard, long-form, titled blog post.
• Notes. Short, titleless posts, like tweets or status updates.
• Photos. A post where the content is a photo. To be distinguished from an article that happens to contain a photo in that, with a photo post, the photo is the content.
• Videos. Take a wild guess.
• Replies. A comment on someone's blog post or tweet, but now promoted to an identifiable piece of content in its own right.
• Likes. The notion of a "like" on some content, but recasted as a standalone independent post belonging to the person doing the liking.
• Repost. Very similar to a like, but conveying the notion of "sharing" someone's content on your personal "post space".
• Bookmarks. Very similar to a like or repost, but indicates more of a "read later" semantics.

There are others. I'm not being exhaustive.

Someone who maintains a personal website is not, obviously, under any obligation to post all these different things. People still maintain traditional blogs, after all. But it's hard to deny the convenience of a note, for example, when you just want to say something short and sweet without the hassle of having to write a whole essay.

Organizing Is Hard

For people who do publish all these different things, like me, the immediate problem becomes how to organize it all. Organizing, in this context, means grouping your content into feeds for easy and convenient consumption, usually via Atom, RSS or microformats.

One obvious approach is to avoid organizing it at all, and just dump all your posts into one feed. Subscribers would get everything - every like, every note, every photo, every article. To be fair, there is actually something to be said for this approach and I'd like to think that there are at least some people who would be interested in everything I post online.

So, providing a fire hose of all my content as an option is perhaps a good idea. But it would be a bad idea, I think to stop there, as I suspect that not everyone is interested in knowing all the gritty details of which posts I've liked and reposted. So where to go from there?

Moving in the opposite direction, some people on the IndieWeb (Neil Mather for example) provide a distinct feed for every single type of content they support. You can browse a list of Neil's likes, for example, or a list of his photos or replies or article, all separately.

I'll admit that this has a neat and tidy feel to it. That being said, certain things about the approach bother me somewhat, though it took me a while to suss out what it was.

Do I really need separate feeds for my likes and reposts, for example? From a technical standpoint these two types of posts are virtually identical. Would someone who is interested in my likes really not also be interested in my reposts?

Or how about photos? Should photos really be its own thing, distinct from, say, my notes? Would people interested in my notes really not be interested in my photos? It becomes even more silly when you realize that photo posts are really just media-enriched notes. Why should these go into a separate feed?

Should articles be separate from notes? This one is a bit trickier. I can imagine some people being interested in my articles but not my notes, and vice-versa. At the end of day, though, notes are really just short blog entries without the titles...so maybe not?

Something else to consider is the fact that I post many, many more notes than articles, so someone who just listens for new articles won't get nearly as many updates as someone who listen for new notes. Then again, maybe this is a feature...

How about replies? Replies sit somewhere between a repost and a note, so where do those fit?

As you can see, the subject, for me at least, is not entirely straightforward. So what to do?

First Attempt

My first attempt to organize my content was pretty simplistic:

• I had a "fire hose" feed with everything in it.
• I had an articles feed to house my traditional blog.
• I had a "leftover" feed to house my notes, likes, reposts, bookmarks, replies, etc.

This worked but...wasn't great. In particular, my leftover feed was clogged with likes, reposts and bookmarks which, on their own, were a lot less interesting than my notes and photos. When I redesigned my site, I took the opportunity to reorganize my posts.

And Everything In Its Place

The approach I finally settled on divides my content into two categories:

• Original content. These are posts that make sense on their own. This includes article, notes, and photos.
• Derivative content. These are posts that need external context to make sense. This includes likes, reposts, bookmarks and replies.

The derivative content is, in my opinion, much less interesting than the original content. I have a hard time imagining someone wanting to browse my likes or reposts for example, separately from my notes or articles. In other words, if you want to browse through my likes, I suspect you're probably okay browsing through my notes as well.

This main content divide is tempered with the following observations:

• Bookmarks are special in that they are a bit more private and dynamic than other types of posts. I'll have more to say about this later.
• I have a soft spot for old school blogs, and the idea of completely eliminating the identity of my original blog in favour of a hybrid blog/notes/photos feed breaks my heart a little. Articles, as a post type, are a bit special to me.

With that in mind, I came up with the following scheme:

• Posts. This is my original content, and includes my notes, photos, and articles.
• Blog. This is a separate feed of just my articles, so that my original blog can live on. I could make an argument that some people may just want to read my essays, but really this is all about nostalgia, pure and simple.
• Links. These are my bookmarks. This feed is mostly for me, since I tend to use bookmarks as a "read later" pile.
• Everything. This is a feed of every single post. It's currently the only feed where you can find my likes, reposts, and replies, but they're mixed in with everything else, and I'm making a bet that this is acceptable.

And there you have it. I think I'm more comfortable with this organizational scheme, but time will tell I suppose.