Category: blogging

Posts about blogging

RSS – the Simple Guide

RSS is a means by which you can easily keep up with updates to your favorite websites, all in one place.

You will often see the term “RSS Feed” or see this image associated with it…

RSS logo

When you click on that link, you will usually see a scary page of gobbledygook that looks like this (click here). What you are seeing is the RSS Feed, the content of that website crunched together in a certain format that can be read by your new hero – the RSS Reader.

You don’t need to worry about all that scary code. All you need is the address of that feed.

So, how do you use this?

You download an RSS Reader app to your phone, tablet or computer. Sometimes you’ll see them called RSS Aggregators.

If you are on a computer you can also use a website like Feedly.com.

You just copy the address of that RSS feed, hit the “add” button on your reader, paste in the address, and you will now see every single fucking update to that site. And you do this for every website you want to follow. And you can read the articles in the reader, which means it usually strips out all the ads and bullshit.

If you have not used RSS before, something like Feedly is a good way to get introduced to it. I prefer using a standalone RSS app, even on my computer, to avoid tracking and adverts.

Note: almost all blogs have RSS feeds, even if you don’t see the link. That’s because a lot of blog theme designers suck and don’t make them apparent. With most modern RSS readers, you don’t even need the exact feed address. You can just enter something like “https://bobsawesomesite.com” and the reader will find the feed for you.

As a MacOS/iOS user I use Reeder on my devices as my RSS reader. I also like NetNewsWire. Reeder seems to sync well across all my devices. If I follow a site from my phone, it shows up in Reeder on all my devices. Some web browsers have built-in RSS readers, which is cool.

There are similar readers available for PCs and Android. Just search for “RSS Reader” or “RSS aggregator.”

Here are some screen shots of Reeder, on my phone. You can see how many unread posts are on each site that I follow. For example. The Twilight Sessions has one new post.

Reeder app screenshot

If I click on the Twilight Sessions, it shows me the most recent posts. I can tap one and read it from within the Reeder app.

Reeder app screen shot

Now for the fun part.

Why can’t you find an RSS feed for your friend’s Instagram or Facebook account? Because there’s not one. Those social media silos don’t provide RSS because they want you trapped on their sites and apps. It is that simple. So fuck them. If a site does not have an RSS feed, they are not worth your time and fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

 

The Greatness of the IndieWeb

I just watched this video about the IndieWeb vs Silos, from 2014. Yes. Ten years ago. It is about 14 minutes long. Worth your time.

The silos have gotten worse in 10 years since this talk. Much worse. Most of the other services mentioned, especially those from Google, were shut down.

But THIS SITE – CONCRETELUNCH.INFO – is still here.

If you had a blog back in the early 2000s I’ll bet it is still there too. Or event the late 2000s. Or even the late 90s.

All the current shit – Facebook, X, Bluesky, blah blah blah – all those silos will die, and the blogs will remain. The IndieWeb is where it’s at.

Test Blog Update

I’ve made some progress using Jekyll to create a static-page test version of this site. Just making some test pages and trying to see how it will work.

I’ve got a few things to figure out still. For example, the RSS feed is doing some weird stuff, but I found some info that I think will fix it.

One of the disadvantages of the static site generator is that it pretty much lives on one computer. It creates the pages and updates everything, saving to a folder on the computer, which you then upload oldschool-style to your server. So this means I can’t just jump into the post editor from whatever computer with an internet connection I happen to be using.

Like a lot of people, I think I’ve gotten used to the convenience of being able to access and edit documents and projects from nearly anywhere. Google Drive, stuff on iCloud, Dropbox, whatever. It’s all super convenient.

So why am I obsessed with this step back 20 years? I think there is a certain amount of nostalgia involved, for sure. There’s also an element of control. Much less worry about people hacking the static site and stuff like that. I like the community of people I’ve found who are into this kind of thing as well (https://indieweb.org/)

Also, I was in a conversation with an internet-friend the other day on micro.blog about how punk rock it feels to have a blog. I agree, and I have a lot to say about that, and sometime in the next month or so I will likely write a long post about it.

 

A New Version of Concrete Lunch?

I’ve been doing nerd things.

I’ve been playing around with a static site generator called Jekyll.

What is a static site generator, you might ask?

Well, if you created web pages/sites in the old days, you likely wrote every one by hand. That HTML file contained the whole page, with links to images or whatever. There was no database backend, no embedded javascript, etc. If you were really fancy and smart (like me!), you used Server Side Includes to standardize your header and footer, so you’d only need to change it in one place if you wanted it to change across your whole site.

Flash forward to the late 2000s/early 2010s, and platforms like WordPress, Blogger, etc came about. They use more sophisticated means to deliver webpage. There are databases involved, lots of code and other shit. It’s all very cool. This site runs on WordPress.

You also have to update your site’s content management system (in this case WordPress) pretty often, as hackers and scumbags are constantly trying to log into it, hack it, steal your information, blah blah blah. All that complexity-based convenience comes with a price.

Another price – in theory these content management systems are kinda slower serving up pages, since they are doing a lot more on the backend.

BUT — these days there are number of programs like Jekyll that generate static pages for you, which you then upload to your space on a server (just like in days-of-yore). Since the pages are just HTML, some CSS, and whatever media you might embed in them, they are less vulnerable to hacking.

Also in theory, all else being equal, since there are not database calls involve and other technical fuckery, the static site should serve up to readers much faster (again – depending on connections speeds, etc., which is true for CMSs too).

The drawback?

You have to work harder setting it all up. You have to understand some stuff like installing things from the command line/terminal/whatever. It is all a lot nerdier than just going a Blogger or WordPress site.

Clearly I have too much time on my hands (I don’t).

So here is test.concretelunch.info. Since I’m just figuring this out, the homepage is still a level down in the directories, but whatever. You get the idea. There is supposed to be a process for moving a WordPress blog over “easily” (it is never easy). We’ll see ….

Science Fiction Micro.blog

A few friends know I’ve been keeping a blog just about my science fiction reading for the last year or so. I started it back in April 2023 (I think), when I began my 5% per day reading challenge. https://bloftin2sf.blog. I haven’t really promoted it much because it is really just a personal blog for my own tracking and reflections on reading. In other words — probably not that interesting to most people.

One feature I love on micro.blog is the built-in ability to track your reading. Could have something to do with the fact that the developer, Manton, is a reader. Might also have something with his wife, Tracy, having gone to library grad school and being a reader.

Here’s my 2023 year in books, as tracked via Epilogue and Micro.blog. https://bloftin2sf.blog/2024/02/28/year-in-books.html

At any rate, Manton has created a simple system for tracking and blogging about your reading. He has a companion app for micro.blog called Epilogue, which makes it simple to track your reading from your phone or tablet. He’s done all the work to draw the book information from legitimate bibliographic sources. This is available even on the base $5 per month micro.blog account.

I’m not planning at this point to move Concrete Lunch to micro.blog, as I have a few friends who enjoy commenting here. Micro.blog does not have a comment function, and thus there is no comment spam or harassment. You have to comment through the micro.blog interface, which is limited to users. They do a great job of keeping the system clean.

As part of the fediverse, micro.blog makes it easy to post there and syndicate your writing and other media to other parts of the fediverse, like Mastodon, BlueSky, etc.

The simplicity of being able to post from my computer or easily from my phone with micro.blog is great. The $10 per month premium account allows you to upload videos or podcasts of up to 45 megs, which is a short video or a mid-length podcast. All of this is unattached to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or any of the other commercial sites. Hell, you can run a podcast from micro.blog without having to have an account anywhere else. Amazing value.

Forgot to mention. They just changed the $10 per month account so that you can host up to 5 blogs for that one monthly charge. The service just keeps getting better.

Yes, I can create a post on the mobile version of WordPress, but frankly the interface it clunky and crowded. WP is still great for running a more full-featured site or portal, but it has really grown beyond the notion of “blogging” — a web log. Micro.blog is focused on blogging.

More and more I’m convinced the future of a quality internet is going revolve around pay services. Sure, there will be social media and massive sights like Youtube that are full of great stuff and lots of shit to wade through and put up with, who sell your data to every marketer in the world. And there will be a small fraction of the web that is curated, not free to every lunatic with a phone or computer, and of higher quality, that respects the privacy of its users.