Feeds
I publish this site to RSS because RSS is the part of the web that still belongs to the reader. A feed makes no demand: it does not ask you to make an account, it does not decide what you see next, it does not measure whether you came back. You point your reader at an address, and the writing comes when there is writing, and nothing comes when there isn’t. That is the whole arrangement, and it is the one I trust. I would rather own a worse version of a thing than rent a better one; a feed is how I let you read me without either of us renting anything.
The site is built as a set of rooms, and you can subscribe to one room or to the whole house.
- Everything, the firehose: the field notes, the library, the monthly now, and the bookmarks, in one stream, newest first.
- Field Notes, the stream of undeveloped ideas, written down before they’re understood, most of them probably wrong, newest first.
- Library, a new entry each time I finish a book and write my response to it.
- Now, the monthly reflection, once a month.
- Bookmarks, a linkblog of what I’m reading elsewhere: each link I save, with my own commentary alongside it, newest first, pointing out to the source rather than back here.
Each feed carries full content (the writing itself, not a teaser built to make you click) and shows the most recent entries. The protocol is RSS 2.0 with Atom extensions.
If you don’t yet have a feed reader, Miniflux, NetNewsWire, and Feedbin are good places to start. I host my own.