Syndication for the greater good

I stumbled upon Matt Webb’s About Feeds and realized I had been missing out on the power of web syndication for quite some time. Turns out most sites still make their feed available in one way or another. This allows anyone to subscribe to the content they are interested in without having to rely on a centralized platform. No more checking out one’s twitter feed to see if they published a new piece, you get notified in due time automatically.

One reason I never used RSS feeds before was that I never quite found the right newsreader app, one able to sync between devices, open-sourced and self-hostable. But then I discovered miniflux. I’ve now setup an instance over at miniflux.acatalepsie.fr, running on the same RPi that hosts my site. There’s even an Android app. What a world.

The next logical step was to setup a feed for my site itself, which I did just now. You can find the link in the footer of this site. It’s only the bare minimum as it only shows blog entries — more to come.

The takeaway is: do take the time to download a newsreader app and subscribe to feeds, it will be worth your while. Now, onto making blog posts which are not about the blog itself.