By popular demand, I've made some changes to the site which you may or may not have noticed: A contact email and RSS feed.

I won't belabor the whole email thing, I'm sure anybody reading this already knows and understands what email is and how it works. I opted for email as opposed to a comment feature for a few reasons:

  • There's no need to moderate an email for content.
  • Email is way easier (which is the goal with this site: return to the simpler era of the interwebs).
  • Hopefully email means that folks will be a bit more intentional with any communications to me (as opposed to dipshit comments in a feed from some random passerby to the site; you don't necessarily have to be super prosaic when chatting with me, if that's not obvious based on how I write).

RSS, I have learned, is a bit of a different beast, so I figure it'd be good to both drop a quick primer on what RSS actually is, as well as how to use it.

For all intents and purposes, I understand RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, according to Wikipedia) as a way to aggregate all your favorite things into one single feed: If you want to read the latest Substack article from your favorite author, my entries, and every Reddit post from your micro-niche subreddits all on a single app without having to remember any URLs or check those locations every couple of minutes, you set up an RSS reader.

The other bonus as far as RSS goes in the modern era is the fact that most modern readers can functionally act as a means by which you can be notified of new posts across the gamut of your special interest sites (which is one of the main reasons I set this up here; people kept asking me to update them when I post, and I frankly don't want to do the extra work).

Full disclosure, I'm not going to recommend any applications or RSS readers or anything to you (I'm both a relatively new Linux user on the PC side of things AND I've been shifting toward FOSS for all things cellular and all that, so any suggestions I'd have would likely just be kinda dumb). The only thing I can say is the fact that RSS is an old technology, so there are tons of great options out there. Just do a quick search and snag the first one you can find that seems intuitive and that you like (and, importantly, that is free; this is old tech, so don't get swept up into some dumb subscription which gives you fancy colors or whatever).

As far as how to set it up, I believe all you need to do is copy the RSS link on the bottom of the page and paste it into your RSS aggregator of choice, then it should automatically grab the posts any time I (or any other sites you subscribe to) submit them.

Something to be aware of: depending on your aggregator of choice, there's a chance you'll miss out on any cool formatting or whetever may exist in a post (i.e. my sick themed pictures) just because RSS works by essentially scraping the raw text from the site and regurgitating it into your feed.

Anyway, I think that's it? Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat or are interested in my thoughts on something for whatever reason, and I look forward to hearing from folks!

Until next time.

  • Austyn