change things, images

blog/other-stuff.md

@@ -38,7 +38,8 @@ Obviously this is just stuff *I* like; you might not like it, which isn't really
 * [Schlock Mercenary](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/), a *very* long-running space opera webcomic. It's been running for something like 20 years, and the art and such improve over time.
 * [Freefall](http://freefall.purrsia.com/), a hard-science-fiction webcomic.
 * [Mage Errant](https://www.goodreads.com/series/252085-mage-errant) - a moderately-long-by-now fantasy series with a very vibrant world, and which actually considers the geopolitical implications of there being beings around ("Great Powers") able to act as one-man armies.
-* [Arcane Ascension](https://www.goodreads.com/series/201441-arcane-ascension) - fun progression fantasy series with (... like most of these, actually) worldbuilding I like and good characters. I have only read the first two, since I'm writing this just as the third came out
+* [Arcane Ascension](https://www.goodreads.com/series/201441-arcane-ascension) - fun progression fantasy series with (... like most of these, actually) worldbuilding I like and good characters. I have only read the first two, since I got distracted and have not read much of the third. Somewhat overly long at times.
+* [Void Star](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939057-void-star) - somewhat weird and good. The prose is very... poetic is probably the best word (it contains phrases like "isoclines of commitment and dread", "concentric and innumerable" and "high empyrean")... which I enjoyed, but it is polarizing. The setting seems like a generally reasonable extrapolation of a bunch of ongoing trends into the future, although it's unclear exactly *when* it is (some of the book implies 2150 or so, but this seems implausible). Its most interesting characteristic is that it absolutely does not tell you what's going on ever: an interview I read said it was written out of order, and that makes sense (another fun quirk of it is that the chapters are generally very short). I think I know most of what happens now, but it has taken a while.
 
 Special mentions (i.e. "I haven't gotten around to reading these but they are well-reviewed and sound interesting") to:
 * [The Divine Cities](https://www.goodreads.com/series/159695-the-divine-cities) by Robert Jackson Bennet.

blog/rssgood.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: "RSS: good and useful"
+description: RSS/Atom are protocols for Internet-based newsletter/feed services. They're surprisingly well-supported and you should consider using them.
+created: 14/05/2022
+---
+RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's an underappreciated protocol for generally "following" things on the internet.
+Most people do this via proprietary platforms with feed/notification functionality, the problems of which are obvious, or email.
+Email, though, is push-based - you subscribe to a service and it communicates with your email server whenever a new item is published.
+While this allows new content to be received in near-real-time, it has the significant disadvantage that unsubscription can be difficult and nonstandardized, and your address can be used by anyone else to send you unwanted mails.
+
+RSS inverts this; an RSS reader application periodically checks a list of RSS feeds by downloading them from their servers and displays all new content it finds.
+This makes it a lot easier to manage a lot of feeds or items as an end user, particularly since lots of reader software will also let you categorize feeds to better manage content.
+It's also easier for site admins: because of rampant spam running your own email server (without email from it being immediately discarded) is tricky, so it's generally required to integrate some external, paid service instead.
+RSS only requires serving an XML file, which is very easy to do on top of an existing website, which is probably why it's still pretty widely implemented.
+
+Yes, despite RSS's relative lack of use nowadays, a surprisingly large amount of sites still support it (some might use Atom, a slightly different protocol, but good reader applications support both transparently):
+
+* WordPress, a very popular platform for blogs, has RSS support enabled by default (just go to `/feed/`).
+* YouTube has RSS feeds for channels' videos: `https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[ID of channel to follow]`.
+* Some web fiction sites (e.g. Royal Road, Archive Of Our Own) have per-story RSS feeds.
+* osmarks.net has an RSS feed, linked on the main page somewhere: [https://osmarks.net/rss.xml](https://osmarks.net/rss.xml) - this does only cover blog posts and not experiments, as those aren't actually timestamped.
+* Blogspot blogs have feeds at `/rss.xml`.
+* The BBC has RSS feeds described here: [https://www.bbc.com/news/10628494](https://www.bbc.com/news/10628494).
+* Otherwise, you can ctrl+F for "RSS" or "Atom" or "feed" or "subscribe" and might be successful, or try URLs like `/feed`, `/feed.xml`, `/feed.atom`, `/index.xml`, `/rss` or `/rss.xml`.
+
+As for RSS readers to use these with, there are many implementations available.
+I use [Miniflux](https://miniflux.app/), since it's self-hosted and accessible on multiple devices via the web, and has nice features like keyboard controls, scraping websites which omit some content from RSS feeds, and an integration API which I use to plug it into my convoluted mess of custom scripting.
+The [Awesome Self-Hosted list](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#feed-readers) has many other reader applications like this.
+If you prefer something which runs locally as a desktop application, [Wikipedia has a list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators) (I haven't actually checked this space myself).