This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club!
For members of RSS Club (all of whom I follow, thanks to FreshRSS‘s awesome Dynamic OPML feature), RSS Club provides varying purposes. We probably all agree that it’s a great excuse to celebrate how awesome RSS is, but beyond that we differ.
A common purpose seems to be to provide a platform that’s slightly less well-publicised, slightly more-ephemeral1 than the majority of the content that authors put on their blog, while still continuing to host and control it indefinitely. I’ve enjoyed seeing how some members choose to show content via RSS only that they might not be ready to share more-widely: weeklogs, half-finished ideas, and so on.
That’s been a big part part of the attraction for me. As my drafts folder continues to grow and half-finished ideas stagnate indefinitely, I’ve become increasingly concerned that I’m perhaps too much of a perfectionist about my blogging. Rationally, I know I needn’t be, for two big reasons:
- The popularity2
of a post seems to be only barely-related to the amount of time that went into it. Consider for example:
- Sisiphus: The Board Game (Digital Edition) was thrown together in about two and a half hours and that includes the time taken to implement the game, and really took off – enough that I feel embarassed by the apalling code I wrote to make it!
- I spent far more time implementing my Mastermind solver and blogging and vlogging about it, but it’s attracted far less interest online!
- My primary target audience for my blogging for the last few years remains: myself! I aspire to write content that I myself would enjoy, distribute it by appropriate channels in case it’s of interest to others, and not care one way or another about whether anybody else ever reads it3. Clearly I don’t always succeed, as I’ve demonstrated in the bullet point above, but that’s my goal and for the most part it works for me.
I’m trying to get better at publishing things when they’re “good enough”, and RSS Club is in some ways a gateway to that. In my RSS only posts, I don’t always feel like I even have to re-read them before I click “publish”. If there are mistakes, I’ll go back in and fix them later! It’s an effort to encourage a more-casual and laid-back attitude to my blogging, and I feel like it’s working.
Also; writing RSS only posts helps me feel like I don’t have to stay on-topic as much as I might otherwise. On which note: I’m really loving how the “Twitter Migration” has breathed a whole new level of energy into the Fediverse; I dusted off my old Mastodon server earlier this month, installed… umm… let’s just say a lot of patches (ahem)… and started chatting to newcomers. I’ve helped a couple of other instances manage their scaling-up, and I’m loving the fact that the old vibe still remains and the toxicity of the “birdsite” has so far been kept out. Fingers crossed for its future. If you’ve not come and said hi to me there yet, you’ll find me – of course – as @dan@danq.me.
Footnotes
1 Like Derek’s notes, where you can only see the most-recent 10 unless you already know where they are (or are, you know, willing to reverse-engineer the source code of his “random note” page: the risks of a static site implementation!).
2 I’m only really able to track popularity by direct feedback, such as comments and reshares, because I’ve been working at stripping all other analytics tools out of my infrastructure to improve the performance and privacy footprint of my personal websites.
3 Again: this is part of why I actively avoid analytics!
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