A mad moment of panic when I thought I'd completely broken the blog but it turned out that I've forgotten to set a variable under a specific circumstance. No errors were being logged so I was initially at a complete loss as to where the problem was. Rolling back changes a bit at a time pointed to the MySQL queries failing but, in truly unhelpful fashion, PHP doesn't let you know why.
What is RSS Club? Is it's an idea started by Dave Rupert where blogs provide RSS-only content. He describes it as follows:
RSS Club is a collection of blogs (personal and otherwise) committed to providing RSS-only content. It's like a newsletter delivered to your feed reader in order to celebrate the medium of RSS and breakaway from social media.
RSS Club posts will not appear on the blog by default, only being accessible via special permalinks or on the RSS Club page itself which, again, needs a specially formatted link to access.
I was put on to RSS Club by Kev Quirk and thought it was such a cool idea. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing with it yet but part of Dave's description rings true: "a newsletter delivered to your feed reader". I can envisage this becoming a replacement/successor to the muse-letter with the advantage of not having to manage a mailing list.
There are three rules of RSS Club:
Don't Talk About RSS Club
Don't Share on Social Media
Provide Value
You'll not find me talking about RSS Club in any 'public facing' posts βΒ any posts are for your eyes only dear subscriber. I've even built a second RSS feed for the purposes of pushing posts to micro.blog so that the only place you can get them is via the main RSS feed. As I no longer use any other social media I'm certainly not in danger of breaking the second rule.
As for the third rule, I'll do what I can.
So, how does this all work?
An extra column has been added to the posts table as an RSS only flag. I've added a new checkbox to the post form which sets this flag in the database and adjusts the permalink for that post. The blog page (and random post page) has been updated to exclude RSS only posts unless the URL includes the variable s=rss. With a properly formatted URL, posts will appear as normal at the correct point.
The RSS Club page also performs a check for the variable and redirects back to the homepage if it isn't there. The page will list all RSS Club only posts in one place for easy reference β an exclusive location for your eyes only. All very cloak and dagger.
If all works correctly you will see this post in your feed reader but not on the blog, unless you click through from the feed allowing you to see it in situ and comment as normal. This also means that there are no dead links, you just have to have the right ones.
π
I have no plans or expectations as to where this will go or what I will post via this channel. It's a bit of fun that, who knows, could develop into something.
I have officially retired the muse-letter for the foreseeable future. I'd like to say a huge thanks to everyone who joined me on that particular journey and made it all worthwhile.
That doesn't mean that it won't return in some form, or even be replaced by something else. I'm always looking for the best way to get the words down and not beat myself up when I let something slide.
So keep watching the feed β you never know what's going to happen next!
