It's no secret that I've been struggling to finish tracks lately. I have an idea, create a loop, listen to it excessively, then can't extend it out to a full track.

I had three separate tracks at various stages of completion then my brain decided to have yet another idea when it woke me at about 4:30 the other morning.

If only everything came together that easily.

Last night, I went up to the studio just to see if anything would happen. The flood gates opened and I got about 90% of that new idea made — all of the patterns and recording, with just some editing and production to complete this morning.

OK , so it meant I didn't go to bed until far too late (I completely lost track of time, and I'm paying for it a bit today) but it was so worth it.

I've linked to Terry Godier a few times lately (primarily with regards to being influenced by Current, his RSS // feed reader) and am going to do so again. This time it's in regards to the Byline extension for feeds:

Byline is an extension vocabulary for RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed that provides structured author identity, context, and content perspective. It solves content collapse: the loss of context that occurs when content from diverse sources arrives in a unified stream.

This is essentially /about info direct within a feed.

It reminds me of the nowns (NOW Namespace) extension that I proposed a while back.

Implementing it in a feed is really easy, as it should be. First, you add the namespace to your feed:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:byline="https://bylinespec.org/1.0">

then include the elements you need:

<byline:contributors>
  <byline:person id="colin">
    <byline:name>Colin Walker</byline:name>
    <byline:context>Blogger, hobby coder, creator of acid music.</byline:context>
    <byline:url>https://colinwalker.blog</byline:url>
    <byline:avatar>https://colinwalker.blog/images/colinwalker-thumb.jpg</byline:avatar>
    <byline:profile href="https://github.com/colin-walker" rel="github"/>
    <byline:profile href="https://bsky.app/profile/colinwalker.blog" rel="bluesky"/>
    <byline:profile href="https://randomelements.bandcamp.com/" rel="bandcamp"/>
    <byline:theme color="#333333" accent="#FFB029" style="light"/>
  </byline:person>
</byline:contributors>

I've updated my feed, it will take effect overnight.

What will be interesting is adding it to /reader so that it can read the byline info from feeds. I'm thinking about how and where I do this.