Following along with RSS
I understand the anxiety that you might feel about obtaining wacky knowledge from this site. “It was so simple when you posted to WhatsApp.” Yes, it was. But WhatsApp is sort of a throw-away medium. Ask yourself, for example: “I remember a great piece of knowledge that Don Roberto posted a couple years ago about transplanting cactus, but how do I find it now?” Not so obvious. And, you can’t share this knowledge with others (if you find it) without copy/paste/email or (worse) forwarding it on—again—via WhatsApp. WhatsApp is built this way on purpose!
So, instead of sending all this knowledge to Meta so they can train their AI, I’m just saying “no”. They can come get this knowledge by prying it out of my cold, dead web site. Maybe one day, they will have to send me royalties for using this collective wisdom for their evil purposes.
There is another way to “consume” these pieces of knowledge that is fairly simple: it’s called Really Simple Syndication, or, RSS. With RSS, you open a “reader” (often a browser extension) and see the new articles that have appeared. You can also go back and see earlier articles. This is not that much different from WhatsApp (or Slack, or Signal, or ..). Readers are available for computers as well as phones.
There is something—a big thing—missing however: dialog. It’s possible to set this up, but a fair amount of work. RSS is more about publishing.
So, I’ll still be using WhatsApp for the back-and-forth. But I really hope to move more substantial posts to Remulac, with links provided on WhatsApp.
Where was I? Oh yes, RSS.
The mechanics of RSS
First, you need a reader. This might be an app or a browser extension. I have installed the Feedbro (what an appropriate name!) extension in FireFox. It seems ok. I wanted to install NetNewWire on my Mac because reviews said it is one of the best and free. Unfortunately, it only runs on newer versions of MacOS (I’m stuck at Ventura). I bought (for $10) Reeder Classic. And this app does not support RSS feeds protected by HTTP Basic Authentication (which is used by Remulac for the conehead feed). So, be warned. Other apps may have the same restriction.
Second, you need to subscribe to a Remulac feed. I have not worked on making this super easy (e.g. just click), but I’ll work on it. In the mean time, it is still easy: just type/paste the feed URL into your reader when you are creating a new subscription/feed. The feed URL’s for Remulac are https://remulac.eu/feed.xml and https://remulac.eu/conehead/feed.xml. Warning: these URL’s may barf if you type them into your browser, but try!. They work for readers only.
Now, you should see the articles and you can . . . wait for it . . . read them!
Bonus: You can subscribe to feeds other than those on Remulac! Like XKCD.
One more thing: The conehead feed only works for Coneheads. You need to use the same name and password that you set up to access inner Remulac space. The readers (like browsers) need to save these credentials so you don’t have to type them each time. See the above warning about some apps not supporting these protected feeds.
Do I lose if I don’t use RSS?
Not so much. I’m not going to be generating a flood of material. If I’m really in the mood for sharing, I’ll post a heads-up on WhatsApp. You shouldn’t—and most likely won’t—be checking the Remulac site to see if anything is new (that’s what is nice about RSS: you get a little star if something is new).
Most importantly, the ability to go back and find wacky tidbits is on the web site. There is a summarized list of articles and a certain amount of indexing (tags and catagories) to help.