RSS
A few notes after reading: Dave Winer, "A Really Simple social web", Scripting News (2025-12-14)
Since I started writing again (occasionally, intermittently, &c.) last year, I've just been doing a straight HTML (+ CSS + JavaScript) website. The impetus for that was fairly simple: I had been paying a lot for web hosting over the years and I stopped doing that entirely. I think the folks at SiteGround did a good job, but spending the money was a hard sell at home.
Incidentally, I also like the attitude of running a site in plain HTML again—it's just like the 90s again. And I'm one of those people who yells at clouds about how the web used to be Good—well, if not Good like the quality of the web sites was good, but at least it was Nice. Maybe it was because everyone wasn't online yet, so the network effect of so many people yelling at each other hadn't been activated yet. I'm sure that's part of it. But also there was friction involved in creating and maintaining a site. If nothing else, some of the effort that could otherwise be spent on yelling had to be spent on doing what is now handled by Someone Else, some social media company or WordPress as a backend or whatever.
So it's nice—Nice—to go back to a low quality site again. I'm not sure it will lead to high quality thoughts, but I'll be too busy opening and closing tags to care.
Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point was: running a web site out of WordPress meant that I had a ready-to-go RSS feed. The software created it for me based on the post I entered into the backend form which was stored off in a database and some tables somewhere. It felt like something technically advanced—some kind of magic that I couldn't possibly understand.
I looked into it. So. It's just an XML file with the text/code from the blog posts. Obviously. I'm not sure what I was expecting.
So, here it is again: kirkkittell.com/rss.xml.
One day I might automate some of this site—something that will allow easy changing of all the post templates, for example, or copying over HTML blog post articles into the RSS file. Or maybe not. I don't know. There's something satisfying about doing things the difficult, contrarian way, but maybe that's just my problems talking. In the meanwhile I'm going to copy and paste the text, just as Nature intended.
Related, I guess: this many years later, it's still irritating that Google killed Google Reader... but I didn't realize it was all the way back in 2013 that it got axed. (David Pierce, "Who killed Google Reader?", The Verge (2023-06-30)). I use Feedly's News Reader now, which is probably the closest in spirit to Google Reader, but there will always be a Google Reader sized hole out there.