RSS Rants

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting.

The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why:

  1. RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing the point. It’s another delivery channel for your content. You wouldn’t sign up people for a newsletter where you just send a message saying “I’ve got a new post up. Go read it.” The same should apply to your RSS feed.
  2. RSS getting treated like an afterthought. Cool, you added some neat integration with some external service! Did you look to see what happens to those posts in your RSS feed? A lot of the time it’s literally a blank post. Other times it’s malformed junk missing any context of what’s supposed to be there.
  3. RSS getting misconfigured. There’s a lot of implementations of RSS feeds for different static site generators and blogging engines and CMS’s out there, but a lot of them feel like they were implemented so they could add “RSS support” to their checklist. As a result, you get blogs where every time they make a new post, every single post on their site gets marked as updated in RSS. In most of the cases I’ve bothered checking, basically the lastBuildDate is getting populated with the last date the site was built, rather than the last date that specific content was updated.

I keep hoping some of these folks will fix their systems and approaches, but I think I’m going to have to do a cull sometime soon. Depending on your RSS reader, some of this may be more noticeable than others, but for me, I’ve had enough.

Earworms for June

On a bit of a 90s kick here. There was this whole period in the mid-90s that had an explosion of music that just hit this sort of zeitgeist, where even the songs that musically differed still had this particular DNA that you can absolutely see in hindsight. And frankly, some of the songs still feel relevant today, musically and lyrically. Anyway, hope you enjoy. (Trying to keep these to 10-12 songs – there were a lot of songs I thought about adding but opted not to.)

Playlist:

Got any favorites from that era that you’d add?

Sleep Phases

Hank over on vlogbrothers has a quick little video talking about what is arguably a disorder, but only because society doesn’t support it particularly well: having a different sleep pattern than most people.

My natural sleep cycle is the same as his: when left to my own devices, I always tended towards being up til 2 or 3am, and waking up closer to 10am. Of course, for the past several years I’ve had a dog that thinks whenever it gets light out is the right time to wake up, and a job that (when I was living on the west coast) trended towards early morning meetings (to accommodate folks in Europe… and because we just had a lot of morning people on the team). I will say, it’s been a lot easier to wrangle the meetings since moving three time zones eastward.

I’m mostly adjusted to my current cycle (which puts me to bed around midnight and up around 7-7:30), but I still find it pretty easy to start slipping towards 1 or 2am, especially if I’m taken out of my routine for things like vacation. I suspect I’ll still be on this cycle for quite some time, since even if I won the lottery and didn’t need to worry about work schedules, Cecil is still a morning puppy (and Mabel has picked up his habit). And that’s (mostly) fine. But I do sometimes miss the way my brain felt when I was able to be on my natural sleep cycle instead – I feel like I was more relaxed, more at ease, and had more spoons for things.

First Creemee of the Summer

It’s been a chilly spring – a few warm spells here and there, but the back half of May basically didn’t break 50 and was raining more often than not. Even Memorial Day weekend was pretty wet and cool. So yesterday, when it finally climbed into the 70s and got sunny? A delight. The ice cream stand down the street is now open for the season, so what better way to inaugurate the summer with a creemee?

Yes, I’m spelling that right. It’s a Vermonter thing – think soft serve ice cream, but where the cream they’re using is 10% butterfat instead of the usual 5%. Combine that with a nice maple syrup for your flavoring, and the result is an excellent treat with a creamy sweetness that’s not too overpowering and a mouthfeel that’s better and richer than most soft-serves. If you’re ever in Vermont in the summer, I highly recommend snagging one from one of the random seasonal ice cream shops that pop up all over the state.

Love your music

Wil Wheaton had a nice post talking about music and discovering the full length album version of In A Gadda Da Vida (all 17 minutes of it) for the first time recently. I can’t share in that particular revelation, as I was already familiar with those epic organ and drum solos – Dad has/had the album and we definitely spent some time enjoying the “back catalog” over the years. Worth a listen if you haven’t, though!

It got me thinking a bit about this fantastic bit from Joe Pera Talks With You:

There’s something great about just earnestly loving a song, and letting yourself get swallowed by it for a while. Also, that even if you think everyone already knows a song or movie or book, there’s still so, so many people who’ve never heard of it before. I don’t watch reaction videos very often, but sometimes it really tickles me to watch reaction videos of someone hearing a song for the first time, when it actually hits them and they’re left saying “Wow, how did I miss this?”

On that note: some recent earworms to infect/enjoy:

Playlist above:

Quick Updates

I have a whole rant-y post that I’m not posting because I’m pretty sure y’all are already aware of how fucked things are right now and me venting my feelings on it won’t really help. So instead, a few quick site updates:

  • Updated the About page a little to catch it up on the fact I’ve moved back to Vermont and am now doing software development rather than technical writing.
  • Added another aphorism to Maynard’s Rules.
  • Updated the Walkabout gallery (now caught up to December 2023 😅).
  • Various server-side updates that should be invisible to y’all.

I’m still here.

Black Dragon rock formation in Utah. Dark red rocks in the midground, with a cloudy sky above and a desert landscape with desert brush in the foreground.

Why “Remember Device” is a Lie

A quick read from Matthew Lyon, “Forget This Device“, where they dug out the reasons why so often the simple little affordance some log in prompts have of “Remember me” or “Remember this device” end up being utter BS. A lot of the reasons basically come down to poor implementations, and outdated approaches to cookies (most browsers don’t store cookies from other domains at this point, as a default security measure… guess what a lot of authentication prompts use to store your login). It’s not an exhaustive list, but if you were ever curious, it gives a nice breakdown of some of the common reasons.

Next step is convincing developers to fix those problems.

Thanks for All the Fish

Communities are hard. This is true whether you’re talking about in-person communities or online communities, but for right now I’m mostly talking about online communities. They’re hard to set up and cultivate, they’re hard to maintain and manage. The mechanics of an online community isn’t really the hard part, though there’s certainly some technical expertise to get them set up properly. What makes them hard is that a community is inherently made of people. There may be some sort of cohesive glue that brings folks together, to start to bond and connect and create that sense of community, but it’s still a jumbled pile of different individuals with individual needs, desires, personalities, and challenges. Even assuming you manage to get everyone moving in one rough direction and start cultivating community, keeping them moving in the same direction and keeping that cohesion… well. There’s a reason so many communities fizzle out before too long (or worse, explode from internal drama).

I think we’ve all experienced it to one degree or another. So, when you finally find a community that you like, and that seems healthy, you appreciate it. I really, really appreciated the XOXO community.

Continue reading “Thanks for All the Fish”

2025

Here we sit, wrapping up the first day of 2025. It’s been a busy year. We started the year continuing our year-long wander around the country, while continuing to work remotely and taking on a significant project that took most of the year. We finished our walkabout and moved to Vermont. We bought a house! We adopted a second dog, Mabel! On top of the walkabout, I also flew out to Portland for the last XOXO, and just a few weeks ago, Simone and I spent a week in the Bahamas.

I’ll be honest with you: while the year has been filled with a lot of good things, I’m tired. One of the things that fell off was writing here (and gathering notes and journaling in general). I could make lofty goals and resolutions to make 2025 the year of the blog (there’s certainly been a lot of call for it in various circles), but nah. I’m certainly going to try and get back into a groove for sharing interesting bits and thoughts, but I’d prefer to roll with it and see where things go rather than promise some sort of cadence or content here.

So, no new resolutions. At best, there some general direction I’d like to go on a few things. And I’m okay with that. My New Years wish is that you’re okay with that, too: be gentle with yourselves this year. Pursue what makes you happy, but do so with kindness and acceptance, not pressure and stress. Play with and explore what excites you and makes you happy, without the trap of turning it into a job.

Happy New Year.