It has been snowing here in the Dallas area for a couple of days. Not a huge amount, but enough to make the streets icy.
I generally hate cold weather and snow, but there is one thing I love about snow. When it snows or we have ice, it is super quiet outside. Hardly anyone is driving. The drone of air conditioners disappears. Even the sounds from the freeway about two miles away is lessened significantly.
Snow days are the quietest days in Dallas.
I have taken my experimental static website and moved it to a subdomain of this blog.
https://skateclips.concretelunch.info
I think it looks like an art gallery.
This new gallery is not technologically connected to this main blog. There is are no comment fields there. I want it to be a more oldschool organic thing. If someone wants to comment, the email address is right there. It can be easily followed using the RSS feed, which is shown on almost every page.
I’m composing this using voice dictation, so I’m sure there will be some mistakes. Tonight I watched the old Hammer horror film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Slight spoiler. The monster isn’t actually from Hell.
The movie stars Peter Cushing, so you know it’s going to be pretty good just because he’s in it. While not particularly terrifying, the movie does take place in an insane asylum. So the depiction of seriously mentally ill people in this old horror film was pretty interesting.
This is the kind of film I would’ve watched on a Sunday afternoon when I was a kid. I’m surprised I’d never seen it. It would’ve seriously disappointed me. However tonight I was not disappointed, but delighted
I’m looking forward to setting up this new Cockfight Skateboards Matt Money deck. It’s 9″ x 33″ with a 15″ wheelbase. Should be really good for parking lot style, ditches, and parks. I’m going to put Indy 169s and some 54mm 99a Bones STF on it. I’ve got a bunch of bank tricks I want to work on. Of course, we’re about to have an “arctic blast” hit the DFW area, so it’s going to get really cold. I always pick the best times to set up a new board. I also got some new New Balance skate shoes that I’m currently breaking in, before my current one fall apart.
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…
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.
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.
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.
