This is an RSS Club only post! Please do not share.
Dave Rupert's idea that RSS Club is "like a newsletter delivered to your feed reader" has never felt so apt during this time away so I fully intend to keep them going. I'm not sure how frequent they will be but I want to continue using them to go beyond the blog itself. Rewarding those who subscribe to your RSS feed seems like a wonderful thing to do.
As mentioned last time, there will be a degree of focus on my mental health journey but I want keep building on the labels functionality so that I can better maintain threads and look for patterns. The site won't become as much of a PKM system as I had previously thought it might but (I hope) there will still be an element of that happening. How that transpires is open to review and exploration in the months ahead.
I may not have been blogging but work on the site has continued (once a tinkerer...) so that things are in the best place possible. Various bugs and glitches have been fixed that primarily came from moving the blog to /blog. Things like post redirects, specifically RSS Club posts, weren't being correctly handled but that should all be working okay now.
I found some issues with OPML support in /reader, both importing and exporting. I don't know how I thought it was fit for purpose as it was.
Just before I caught covid, Dave Winer wrote about and implemented markdown support for RSS feeds. If a blogging system supports posting with markdown he thought it made sense that the source of posts could be included in a feed without being rendered to HTML. Using the "source namespace", items in feeds can have a source:markdown element which - somewhat stating the obvious - includes the markdown source for that item. A reader or other app can then choose to use that source and have greater flexibility.
I thought this sounded like a great idea but, between having stepped away from the blog and then catching covid, I didn't have the headspace to do anything about it.
Until this week!
/reader now supports source:markdown elements, using them where present instead of description or content, so I can consume markdown from feeds directly. My live RSS feed also includes them. As (b)log-In uses custom markup to render text in certain circumstances I have to render this before insertion into the feed, but the joy with markdown is that it was designed to include HTML tags where necessary, so nothing is broken.
There are a few more small changes I want to make but nothing that really impacts anything, just little tweaks that make things a bit nicer to use.
