daisyblog

Yes. It's finally happened. 

I've been threatening to create an RSS feed for the website for a while now, but especially over the last couple of months since I've been slowly divesting from other social media, which most people are using as fancy, bloated RSS readers which you have very little control over and which suck the data directly out of your bones with each second you spend on them... that's where our data comes from, right?

The point is, I actually got through most of the more pressing things like having a working blog, having a unified aesthetic, and streamlining my workflow on the backend a little bit. So I hunkered down to spend some time just seeing what was possible for me to achieve with creating a static Atom feed from scratch, and I came up with something that works! It even passes a validation test! I started with RSS, which has the benefit of being quite simple. It didn't take long at all. So I tried Atom as well, which is similar enough to RSS that that didn't take long either, but struck me as more robust and as the more modern standard (RSS hasn't been maintained in like, 20 years??), so I went with that. I orignally considered attempting to write a script/scripts that could update the RSS automatically, but that was too ambitious to begin with at my level of skill LMAO maybe someday.

Now, I know RSS/Atom feed aren't exactly en vogue these days with the kids, heck I definitely haven't been using it this whole time even though I at least knew it existed, but listen, I think it's gonna make a comeback. I think people should make a bigger deal out of RSS and I especially want people to understand that there's an easy, free, extremely private way to keep up-to-date on almost all of your favorite websites without even having to log into anything. People should consider that a large reason why a lot of us are still stuck with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is because we want to keep getting updates from people, creators, and organizations that we're interested in, so we can have their content delivered right to us. The first thing people ask me about my art is "Are you on Instagram/Facebook/etc?" (I am on Instagram for now, but no longer maintaining it and eventually leaving.) What if you could have that, without The Al Gore Rhythm™ controlling what you see, hiding some of your feed from you and suggesting whatever your friends are looking at, and WITHOUT EVEN SEEING ANY ADS?? 

You totally can! 

So that's what brought me back around to RSS feed.

How do you use it? (DON'T LAUGH, lots of people really don't know.) Download the RSS feed reader of your choice (I like Akgregator on my computer and Feeder on my phone,  and I know that both can display the images I put in the feed) or an extension for your browser. Find the function for adding a feed, and it'll ask you for a URL/address. Type in my website and you'll have three feeds to choose from: The general gallery feed, the "rated-r" gallery feed, and the blog feed. You can pick just one or all three, etc. Then click "OK" or "Add" or whatever means "Affirmative" on your interface and you should see the feed content right away, and you'll be able to either check the feed to see new posts or get notified when they come in. Almost all software termed "RSS reader" also reads Atom feeds (because "RSS" has been genericized like "Kleenex" or "Xerox"), so you generally don't have to worry about differentiating the type.

And if you're new to using RSS (which I'm just assuming of at least some people who have still been following me around on the Internet, since so many people aren't using it), and you want more stuff in your feed, just start typing in whatever websites host your favorite content and more often than you'd think, you'll have AT LEAST one feed to choose from. I'm talking literally every news site, every WordPress blog, every Blogger site, YouTube channels, and I learned recently that you can even follow Mastodon accounts with RSS, though I'm not sure yet about other federated feeds. (And for people who DO use mastodon, you might still consider following people via RSS, because the RSS feed DOES NOT BROADCAST BOOSTS, only the original posts from the user!!) You can do this for my Mastodon feed, for example, by entering in the address field:

https://mastodon.social/@itsmeholland.rss

Easy peasy!

So enjoy your new ability to get notified whenever I post some more nonsense in the art sections. :)