RSS - Real Sexy Streamlining of Media
In which I discover RSS feeds, go on a tangent about the latest Devon Price essay, and make my first blog-postly photo roundup.
Oh, my dear friends, I have thrilling news!! I have discovered how to do awesome sexy footnotes that actually work as intended!!
Behold!! —> [1] <--
What a glorious, glorious day. All is now well! It was actually pretty easy once I managed to find a tutorial that actually worked[2] haha.
I'm still planning on doing longer asides indented like this, but shorter ones shall be done in footnote form
I also wanted to let you know that at the bottom of the post (and, likely, most posts from now on) there will be a section called The Blog-Postly Photo Roundup, where I will share all the images from my life since the last blog post was made that I wanted to share on Instagram but didn't.
I was going to called it a Weekly Roundup, but I think its highly unlikely that I will post every week. So rather than weekly, monthly, etc, the time frame is "however long it's been since the last blog post": blog-post-ly.
Feel free to just skip to that section if you don't have spoons to read the whole post but would still like to stay connected!
Much love, friends. Happy reading!
Welcome back, esteemed guests, for the next chapter chronicalling my divestment from technofeudalism; now that I have a place to write, I need a place to read!
Luckily for me, the internet had just the solution, a true staple that's been in use for more years than I've been alive: RSS feeds.
I'm going to explain what these are and how they work, because whilst I've spent my whole life seeing "RSS" pop up all over the web, I could not have told you what it was or how to use it until approximately two weeks ago lmao.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication[11], "syndication" referring to the act of broadcasting media to different locations[3]. In this case, the media that RSS broadcasts is updates to any website that has RSS enabled.
With an RSS reader, you are able to receive broadcasts from any RSS-enabled website you like. Each website's RSS broadcast is referred to as its RSS feed, and is denoted by a unique URL that can be accessed by RSS readers.[4]
This works very handily for news sites. Below, you can see what the RSS feed for the ABC looks like: every time the website updates due to a new article being published, it gets broadcast through the RSS feed:
This is one of the most bare-bones RSS readers, Google's RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome. I wouldn't recommend it, lol, in fact I thought I had it disabled? But apparently not.
Regardless, it does a good job of showing just how simple and bare-bones RSS can be, the article title and summary line. You're able to click each headline to jump over to the actual article on the abcnews website if you want to read it.
The following screenshot is how this same feed shows up in the RSS reader that I usually use, Feedbin[6].
Here, the RSS reader fishes the article's main image out of the website, and presents it all in a very neat and tidy way. Additionally, Feedbin can render the entire page itself if you ask it to, so you can read the page contents without leaving your RSS reader app!
So many websites have RSS built into them: news sites (especially independent or ones that aren't for-profit), blogs and sites like Substack and Medium [5], and open-access social media sites like Bluesky (which means you can follow someone's Bluesky feed without needing to create a Bluesky account or download the app), just to name a few.
Depending on what RSS reader you're using, you can also connect to feeds for podcasts and Youtube channels, or receive a special email address you can use to sign up to mailing lists or newletters with so that they go to your RSS reader and not your email inbox.
You can tell if a website has an RSS feed by using browser extensions such as this one I use for Chrome. When you're on a website with one (or multiple) RSS feeds, it will let you know how many its detected, and give you the URL for each of them.
What all this means is that using RSS feeds you can essentially custom-build your own media feed!
Once you choose what feeds to subscribe to, you can arrange them into any categories you like. Here's what mine looks like in its early stages - each category can be scrolled through at leisure like its own little un-evil instagram.
Custom RSS Feeds
There are also ways to generate RSS feeds for websites that don't have them enabled. There are a bunch of paid services that will do it for you, or you can head over to RssEverything to do it yourself for free, if you're up for a little bit of HTML deciphering and pattern matching[7].
You can generally generate your own RSS feed for any website that isn't a profit-driven social media mega-corporation (see: instagram and twitter). Those companies are so focused on ensuring that you have to view their content through their app that they apparently change the HTML setup of their websites regularly to break the code of custom RSS-feeds/similar programs!!!!! Just to make it as hard, annoying, and sisyphean as possible!!!!
I'm rather sad about this. For a brief moment I thought I would be able to take the public insta accounts of people I actually wanted to hear from and put them into my RSS reader !!! Some paid services let you do it, but the folk on reddit tell me that the feeds from there constantly break and switch from being on and offline chaotically, due to aforementioned "instagram constantly trying to fuck up the feeds to make you go on their app instead".
I've only had Feedbin and its RSS feeds set up for about a week, but it's been so nice to have a place to go that isn't twitter/facebook/instagram if I'm bored and want to read something on my phone! I've started getting through the backlog of my friends' newsletters, and I was able to read the latest Devon Price essay without needing to be told by Substack or Instagram that it had been published! Very exciting stuff.
My journey is only just beginning though, and I wish to fill my RSS reader with more writing from more excellent people! And so, I ask you -
What have you been reading on the internet lately? Whose newsletters are you subscribed to? What Substacks or blogs do you read? What video essays are you watching? Please send me recommendations of people to engage with!!
To conclude the long-form blogging section of this post, I thought I'd share an article I really appreciated reading this past week: Interact With Minors - Against the collective neglect of the young, by the aforementioned Devon Price.
(CW: the article contains discussion of child abuse, including how and why it occurs)
Devon
This piece beautifully puts words to my thoughts and feelings about the ways we adults are ever-increasingly ostracising under-18-year-olds on the internet (and off it), and the very real harm this can have on them.
If you are so inclined, this first piece is followed up by a second article, Abolish Age, that explores youth liberation more broadly and its intersection with disability justice.
Devon
CW: I'm going to be broadly mentioning child abuse and power imbalances in the next few paragraphs. You can jump to The Blog-Postly Photo Roundup to skip this discussion.
A lot of Devon's recent work has been related to breaking down the mechanisms of abuse and highlighting the wide variety of ways in which power imbalances and abuse can occur. These two pieces approach this theme by dispelling the notion that relationships between adults and children are inherently predatory or unsafe, and instead looking at the actual reasons adults are able to harm kids.
Taking these reasons, Devon proposes ways in which we can empower youth to reduce their vulnerability to abuse and general harm.
This topic is really important to me as someone who has spent considerable time as a kid and young adult in wonderful online and offline age diverse communities, has constantly had almost all my friends be older than me[10], and has had a variety of meaningful, consensual sexual and romantic relationships with people one, sometimes two decades older than me.
The rising rhetoric around knocking down these communities and relationships in order to protect younger people is something I fine very distressing. As Devon explains, this course of action doesn't protect: it robs kids of freedom, which leads to isolation and lack of control, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse.
My life would be so much smaller, lonely, less supportive, less authentic, less fulfilling and less queer without having had access to those communities and people. But it's really hard to find the words to express all of this without looking like you don't care about protecting kids from the adults who do mean them harm.
Devon, wonderfully, has written those words here. The level of clarity, nuance and empathy - both for kids and for those who are avoidant or cautious around interacting with them - that he brings to this topic is fantastic, and something I greatly appreciate.
❤️🔥❤️🔥
The Blog-Postly Photo Roundup
Glimpses into my life since the last blog post
Baking
I've been really getting into packet mix baking recently - I don't have enough energy to consistently bake sweet treats from scratch, but packet mixes have come really far in terms of taste and texture compared to what I remember as a kid, and are an awesome accessibility aid!
It's so fun to microdose baking by doing some electric mixing without having to spend half an hour measing out all the ingredients. Plus, it just feels awesome to have an entire big cake and toi go "this was $3 !!!!!!!!!!"[9]
The above cake has a strange shape cut out of it because, in a glorious moment of free-will realisation, I decided to eat some of it immediately after it came out of the oven rather than wait until the whole thing was cooled and iced. It was awesome.
Baldur's Gate III
Gamer Pi's BG3 era continues!!! I actually started a new playthrough even though I haven't finished my first one yet, just because I'm so excited to do the story differently and get to know different characters to the ones I am close to in my first run.
Below you can see a screenshot of my current favourite line from the game.
I'm now going to be saying this to all of my enemies!
Photosynthesis
No, I haven't become a plant - I'm talking about the board game! I haven't played this game in many years, but finally got to pull it out again with Alex, Laura and Jamie[8] last week.
It's sooooooo pretty!! You grow colourful trees!! And it requires a lot of spatial awareness and forward planning strategy, which make my brain very happy.
I came home after playing it and almost immediately roped my housemate Kate into playing it with me too, haha.
images of the board game Photosynthesis, taken from this review
And Finally, I Experienced a Bedtime Jumpscare
That's all from me, friends! See you next time!
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Look!! See how they pop up out of the screen!! They are so discrete and glorious !!! You can read them and then pop them away!
You can event do formatting within the footnote! hallelujah! -
I used this tutorial to incorporate the Bigfoot footnotes javascript library into my website.
The only change was that instead of copying the code for the javascript libraries into the "post.hbs" file (inaccessible on my Starter tier Ghost plan), I put it straight into my footer code injection. - "really simple" referring to how RSS uses only basic text and formatting to do this
- Or, to give you the wikipedia definition: "RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format."
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Many sites automatically come with an RSS feed - here's mine from Ghost!
http://secret-blog.ghost.io/feed -
It's a paid service ($5/month) (i think AUD but i haven't finished the month free trial yet so don't know for sure), but I really wanted to escape ads and have a very streamlined reader with no distractions. Feedbin is prefect for that.
You can read about other RSS readers here - I actually love doing coding like this, so if anyone wants me to make them a custom RSS feed, message me!
- aka R, for those of you who know R!
- plus the cost of eggs 😭😭
- by virtue of being young for my year level at school
- or "Rich Site Summary"
