2024-01-11 08:51:00 +0700 by Mark Smith
In the past few days I've completed a refactoring of all the website's RSS feeds, and I've also added an everything feed. It's part of the bigger redesign of the main page, which currently shows the latest posts from the linkblog, blog, podcast, newsletter and notes. The idea behind the redesign is to move away from each post type in it's own section because it feels disjointed, given that each post type has a different frequency. The redesigned main page will have all the posts interleaved as they occur.
I've been mostly writing notes and links lately and blog posts seem to have fallen by the wayside. Having everything interleaved will hopefully restore some balance. This post is the start of that. Many of the recent notes posts could really have been blog posts. They are quite long and almost all of them have titles. The reason they are ending up as notes is that creating notes is slightly easier, but I think it might also be because the latest page doesn't give you a very good at-a-glance idea of what's being posted. And that is I suppose a bit ironic given that it's called the latest page.
First was to fix how the posts are displayed. Hopefully if the posts are interleaved then the balance of post types is on display so I'll be more conscious of what I'm publishing, and naturally tend to publish a more balanced collection of posts. I started with the RSS feeds, but I'm also working on an interleaved website main page.
Second is to make it easier to post blog posts. The biggest hurdle was that previously the RSS feeds were not full text. Instead they only included the description. That was because I didn't think code snippets would be formatted correctly, so I figured it was best to require readers to click through to the website. Turns out that code snippet formatting is fine, though syntax hightlighting is lost, which is a bit annoying. So the blog post descriptions are no longer necessary. That's already a bit easier.
Ideally I'd like to find a way to create new blog post files from a template. I haven't found a way to do that yet. I looked into some iOS apps that give you ways to create text blocks from snippet templates but the ones I found either didn't do it in a way that I could integrate into my workflow, or they required too many security grants, akin to installing a key logger, which I'm not comfortable with. I need to be able to create a markdown file with frontmatter, both the file contents and filename should be templateable. If you have any good suggestions, please get in touch.
Anyhow that about wraps it up for this blog post. Hopefully there will be more of these going forward.