Neopoligen Feed Structure Ideas

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Add note about web rings and blogrolls
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Add note about how there's a lot here that will likely change and take some time and iterations to solidify

Introduction

Neopoligen is a website builder. While it's not designed to replicate a social network, there are social aspects to it. After all, posting on the web is inherently about sharing. This post covers considerations about how to enhance that.

Provide for sites to have the option to produce one or more feeds
Use Atom for the feeds (which is like RSS if you're familiar with that but not Atom)
Define the feeds in the config file
Config definition to include what amounts to basic querying of what should be included in each feed
Configure which "pages" template will be used for each feed
Allow for individual content pages to override the template they use for the generation
Include the raw Neopolitan source for the content in a custom element in the atom feed. This would let folks apply their own templates. (There are some security concerns to address here like making sure folks can't execute scripts. I'll need help understanding what needs to be done there.)

Following

Another aspect of this is to include the content from other sites via their feeds. My current thinking on this is that a config option would be set up to pull in feeds from other folks.

Provide a default set of templates that can be customized for rending the Neopolitan content from the custom feed section
Add all the feeds you follow into the overall site object so they can be used when generating the site
If you leave your Neopoligen instance running it would poll other feeds at an interval which means you could watch your localhost as a feed reader
Provide the ability to automatically assemble a feed of the feeds you follow for redistribution. (There will need to be a configuration option for which feeds get included in this and which ones don't. This following feed won't be required and is opt-in. Need to think through other privacy considerations there too)
Provide the ability to create multiple output pages based on different colletions of feeds.

Two Degrees Of Connection

This overall setup is designed to provide a way to follow two levels of connetions:

1. The folks you follow directly

2. The folks they follow

It explictly stops there for the primary networking. But, I'm thinking there would be a way to hoist things you see from the feeds from the second level into the first. That way, you occassionally see new stuff that's coming from what would be a third level, but that stuff is explicitly curated.

Replies

There's no built-in way to receive replies to posts. However, my current thinking is that there will be an option built into Neopoligen to add an ID for something that's being responsed to which could then be placed into another custom element in the output feeds.

Neopoligen would also have a feature that checks incoming feeds to see if there's a matching ID for one of the posts that originated in the site that it's building. If there is, that data could be used to show the connection.

If this is turned on it would mean that by default you would see responses from three categories:

1. Sites you follow directly

2. Sites you follow via the second level network

3. Individual posts from sites you don't follow but are hoisted into your second level network by those site owners

Pingbacks

There are, of course

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

and more general

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback

but those can't be provided by Neopoligen directly (since it doesn't have a server component that can accept them)

That said, individuals and businesses that offer hosting could absolutely wire things up to accept them and, for example, create a feed that tracks them that gets pulled back into Neopoligen for use in collecting responses.

~ fin ~