notes/.config/newsboat/rss/felixcrux.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Felix Crux</title><link>https://felixcrux.com</link><description>Technology &amp; Miscellanea</description><atom:link href="https://felixcrux.com/blog/rss.xml" rel="self"></atom:link><lastBuildDate>Sun, 08 Jan 2023 19:47:21 -0500</lastBuildDate><item><title>Feeds: The Only Civilised Way to Read Online</title><link>https://felixcrux.com/blog/feeds-the-only-civilised-way-to-read-online</link><description>&lt;p&gt;How do you follow your favourite online creators and their blogs, articles,
videos, podcasts, comics, or what have you? How do you choose what to read
when you have a few minutes to kill on the bus, or when you want to get caught
up in the morning with a cup of coffee?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Most people hand this choice over to social media, inviting along the whole
associated host of problems like clickbait; outrage amplification; snooping
targeted advertising; radicalising rabbit-holes; echo-chambers and filter
bubbles; algorithms choosing what to show you based on “engagement” rather
than what you’d want for yourself; and on and on.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There’s a better way — and there has been for decades! Amazingly, it seems
underused even within tech circles, and almost completely unknown to the
general public. It’s super easy to use, actually &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; convenient than
social media apps, and leaves you in complete control of what you see.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I’m talking, of course, about RSS/Atom web feeds, and I contend that they
are not only a better alternative, but in fact I’d go so far as to say that a
feed reader is the only tolerable and civilised way to read online! The system
works really well and more in line with what (I think) most people actually
want; it minimizes the use of harmful social media platforms; and it helps
foster a more vibrant, independent, creative, and non-commerical Web. So drop
your non-chronological algorithmically-obscured sponsored timeline, and let’s
have a whirlwind overview of what feeds are and how to use them!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;What are feeds and feed readers?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The core of the problem is this: You might have hundreds of people whose
work you’re potentially interested in, but you can’t realistically regularly
check whether each one has published something new recently. The solution
(first cooked up around 1999!) is a &lt;em&gt;web feed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;news feed&lt;/em&gt;
(sometimes &lt;em&gt;RSS feed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Atom feed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a
href="#appendix-names"&gt;for uninteresting technical reasons&lt;/a&gt;), combined
with a program called a &lt;em&gt;feed reader&lt;/em&gt; (or a &lt;em&gt;news reader&lt;/em&gt; or
&lt;em&gt;aggregator&lt;/em&gt;). I strongly suspect that the wide range of inconsistent
names has been a big hindrance to these tools being widely adopted, but in
practice which name you use doesn’t matter: I’m just going to call them
&lt;em&gt;feeds&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;feed readers&lt;/em&gt; from now on.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A feed is a machine-readable version of new posts on a site. For a blog, it
might contain, say, the last 10 blog posts, much like the human-readable
“front page” of the web version would. A feed reader is a program that
monitors all of the feeds from all of the sites that you’re interested in, and
aggregates new updates in one place for you to read at your leisure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, if there’s a blog or podcast or something else you’d like to follow,
you simply subscribe to it in your feed reader, and now all new updates will
be automagically conveyed to you as soon as they come out. Your feed reader
keeps track of what you’ve not yet read, and displays all posts in a simple
chronological timeline, so you never miss anything. You can catch up whenever
you want; there are no algorithms boosting controversial or sponsored
nonsense; and no ads.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Feed readers would traditionally have been desktop programs that downloaded
all the feeds you were monitoring onto your computer. That model still works
just fine (and in fact may already be available on your computer thanks to it
being a built-in feature of the &lt;a
href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs"&gt;Thunderbird&lt;/a&gt;
and &lt;a
href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/subscribe-to-an-rss-feed-73c6e717-7815-4594-98e5-81fa369e951c"&gt;Outlook&lt;/a&gt;
email clients), but nowadays most people prefer to use online services so that
their read/unread status for individual posts can be synchronized between
their desktop and their phone. Articles can then be read in the browser or in
a smartphone app, and you’ll always be up-to-date with what you’ve already
seen and what you’ve not yet read.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Which feed reader you choose doesn’t matter much. Some popular web app
options include &lt;a href="https://newsblur.com/"&gt;NewsBlur&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://feedly.com/"&gt;Feedly&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://feedbin.com/"&gt;Feedbin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a
href="https://www.inoreader.com/"&gt;Inoreader&lt;/a&gt;, or if you’re up for
self-hosting, &lt;a href="https://tt-rss.org/"&gt;Tiny Tiny RSS&lt;/a&gt;. Desktop
applications include &lt;a href="https://netnewswire.com/"&gt;NetNewsWire&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/"&gt;FeedReader&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://newsboat.org/"&gt;Newsboat&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a
href="https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader/"&gt;Fluent Reader&lt;/a&gt;. There are many more;
these are just a sample. All of the (non self-hosted) web services are paid
products — that’s the tradeoff for not being profiled and advertised at.
Fortunately, most have free tiers or free trial periods, so you can try them
all out and see which you like best. Many try to differentiate themselves by
offering extra features such as optional filtering or even
machine-learning-based prioritization of your feeds, but in my case that’s
what I’m trying to get &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt; from so I just turn those features off
and don’t use them. I personally use NewsBlur, which has worked just fine
(along with their mobile app) for years.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, you pick a feed reader to try out, and set up an account. Then, you
find the feeds published by sites you’d like to follow, and subscribe to them
in your feed reader. You can then check in whenever you’d like, and any new
posts will be there waiting for you in your reader. No more random
outrage-bait or advertising, just a chronological feed of what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;
chose to follow.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;But does anybody actually publish feeds?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, yes, almost every blog or publishing platform out there does
in fact publish a feed (often automatically, without the author needing to do
anything special to set it up). This includes publishing systems like Medium,
Substack, Wordpress, and Blogger, as well as smaller self-hosted site
generators. You can follow feeds from an astonishing variety of sources,
including YouTube channels, &lt;a
href="https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/weather-general-tools-resources/weatheroffice-online-services/data-services.html"&gt;Environment
Canada weather warnings&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://www.cnn.com/services/rss/"&gt;CNN&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494"&gt;the BBC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="
https://github.com/felixc/rexiv2/releases.atom"&gt;GitHub releases&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://status.circleci.com/history.atom"&gt;status pages for online
services&lt;/a&gt;, and of course, the myriad of small blogs out there on the web.
The entire podcasting ecosystem is secretly built on top of feeds — that’s how
new episodes get delivered to you! And, naturally, &lt;a
type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate"
href="https://felixcrux.com/blog/rss.xml"&gt;my feed is right here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To find a feed for a particular site, you can almost always just put in the
address of the website into your feed reader, and it will auto-discover the
feed. If not, first look for the ubiquitous orange and white feed icon: &lt;img
src="/media/img/feed.png" alt=""&gt;, perhaps alongside words such as “feed”, “RSS”, or
“Atom”. There will be a link, which you can put into your feed reader to
subscribe. Web browsers used to highlight the existence of feeds with an icon
in the address bar, and you can restore that functionality to Firefox with &lt;a
href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/"&gt;this
addon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;What about discovering new authors?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is where some forms of social media perhaps have a defensible role to
play. Potential sources for content discovery can be thought of as lying along
a spectrum that at one end has high quality content but low frequency of
discovering new sources, and at the other end has the incredible torrent of
material that can be found online, which is usually of low value.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The most reliable, but slowest, way of finding new feeds to follow is to
wait for friends, family, or coworkers to share links to things they found
interesting. Rather than just read them and move on, take a minute to poke
around the site and see if you think you’d like to see more from that creator.
If so, check whether they have a feed, and subscribe to it. If it turns out
they never post again, there’s no harm done. If it turns out their future
posts aren’t very interesting, that’s ok: just unsubscribe.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A higher-volume but perhaps more inconsistent source of feeds to follow
might be topic/community-focused public aggregator sites. These are a form of
social media, but they center on particular subjects or communities, rather
than whatever anyone would like to share. For example, technologists often
follow &lt;a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/"&gt;Hacker News&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a
href="https://lobste.rs/"&gt;Lobsters&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a
href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/"&gt;the Programming subreddit&lt;/a&gt;.
Like with links shared with you directly, if you find something here you like,
poke around the author’s homepage and consider following them for more. As a
bonus, if you care about accruing karma/points/reputation on these social
sites, this gives you an edge in finding new content to post to them!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get a head start, here are two exported data files of the &lt;a
href="/files/feeds-tech.opml"&gt;tech-focused&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a
href="/files/feeds-general.opml"&gt;general&lt;/a&gt; feeds I follow. You should be
able to import them into your feed reader of choice — hopefully you find
something you like! Note though that I don’t necessarily &lt;em&gt;endorse&lt;/em&gt; any
of these sites or authors; they may just have published one good thing years
ago and I have no idea what they’ve been up to since.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Ultimately, why should I bother with this?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Like I said at the start, for me it comes down to three reasons:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it just works really well — better than alternative options. By
that I simply mean that a feed reader really is the best way to keep up with
blogs and posts! A favourite part of my day is having my morning coffee and
catching up on feeds. I can pick them up when I have a few minutes to spare,
and what I’ve read or not read is automatically synced between my devices.
Easy, pleasant, simple, convenient, and I’m in control of what I read.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The second reason is maybe not universally accepted by everyone, but in my
opinion, it’s a healthier alternative to social media. I feel those platforms
should be used only lightly and warily, if at all. Their very structure
inherently promotes controversy and pile-ons rather than discussion; and fake
“influencer” distortions over reality. While they may be a reasonable way to
keep up with a small group of friends and family, opening the door to
strangers being algorithmically boosted into your timeline, and the associated
advertising and psychological manipulation (whether intentional or merely a
side-effect) doesn’t feel healthy to me. Following blogs directly is a way to
minimize or outright bypass these platforms and still benefit from the wide
range of content out there on the web.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;And finally, the third reason is that I hope that directly following blogs
and creators promotes the older, more independent, non-commercial version of
what the Web could be. Rather than merely a more interactive cable TV channel
controlled by big platforms, we can encourage anyone who has an interesting
story to tell to share it online, and they can build up a dedicated audience
independently, without having to pander and clickbait in the hope of
algorithmically going viral. I want to support &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; version of the
Web by choosing what to read, following small blogs, and enjoying reading long
blog posts written simply because the author had something to say.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3 id="appendix-names"&gt;Appendix: Why all the inconsistent names?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An unfortunate complication when evangelizing or adopting feeds is the
proliferation of opaque names that all mean essentially the same thing. Why is
it like this?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; of what we’re trying to publish is a “feed”. The
original standardized &lt;em&gt;format&lt;/em&gt; for publishing feeds was “RSS”: “Really
Simple Syndication”. Several years later there was a schism in the community
and a separate group produced a new standard format called “Atom”. Today, the
choice of format is largely irrelevant, and essentially all feed readers
support both. However, the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; “RSS” caught on reasonably well, and
so sometimes people will call the generic concept “RSS feeds” — confusingly
even when the actual format in use might be Atom and not RSS!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;However, ultimately, none of these details matter in the slightest to
users. The only reason to know that RSS, Atom, news feed, and web feed are all
possible names is so you can find the link to the feed to plonk it into your
feed reader, which will happily work with any format or name.&lt;/p&gt;
</description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Jan 2023 19:47:21 -0500</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">feeds-the-only-civilised-way-to-read-online</guid></item><item><title>New Recommended Reading: People and Project Management</title><link>https://felixcrux.com/blog/new-recommended-reading-people-and-project-management</link><description>&lt;p&gt;I’ve updated my &lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/library/recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals#people-and-project-management"&gt;
recommended reading list for software professionals&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/blog/introducing-recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals"&gt;introduced
and explained here&lt;/a&gt;) with a new section on people and project management.
&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Don’t think you need the word “manager” in your job title to benefit from
learning these skills. If you want to make yourself more useful to a team,
teach others, help your projects succeed, or guide groups to making good
decisions, these books will help.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/library/recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals#people-and-project-management"&gt;
new section of the list is here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description><pubDate>Sat, 30 Nov 2019 11:27:59 -0500</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">new-recommended-reading-people-and-project-management</guid></item><item><title>More Recommended Reading: Information, Design, and UX</title><link>https://felixcrux.com/blog/more-recommended-reading-information-design-ux</link><description>&lt;p&gt;I’ve just added a new section to my &lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/library/recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals#presenting-information-design-and-user-experience"&gt;
recommended reading list for software professionals&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/blog/introducing-recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals"&gt;introduced
and explained here&lt;/a&gt;). This new section covers the presentation
of information, design, and user interfaces/experiences.

&lt;p&gt;I’m not a designer, and reading these books won’t make you one either. But
every developer should know how to present information and interfaces clearly
and comprehensibly.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can find &lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/library/recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals#presenting-information-design-and-user-experience"&gt;
the list itself here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description><pubDate>Fri, 24 May 2019 16:25:13 -0400</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">more-recommended-reading-information-design-ux</guid></item><item><title>Recommended Reading List for Software Professionals</title><link>https://felixcrux.com/blog/introducing-recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals</link><description>&lt;p&gt;I’ve started putting together a list of the “core” books I recommend for
people interested in exploring different facets of our field. I certainly
don’t think you need to read all of them to be a capable software
professional; rather it is the list I would put together if asked about how to
learn more about specific areas.&lt;p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This list came about because after compiling similar lists two or three
times over the years in various places and formats, I’m following good
development practice and factoring it out for reuse and sharing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can find &lt;a href="https://felixcrux.com/library/recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals"&gt;
the list itself here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The list is far from complete; in fact today I’m starting with just one
area: the culture and history of our field. Over time I will add sections on
technical system design and architecture; project and people management; data
visualization, information presentation, and user experience design; etc. Let
me know if there are areas you want covered, or if you have recommendations of
your own!&lt;/p&gt;
</description><pubDate>Sun, 19 May 2019 14:10:27 -0400</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">introducing-recommended-reading-list-for-software-professionals</guid></item><item><title>Favourite Firefox Feature: Keyword Search Bookmarks</title><link>https://felixcrux.com/blog/favourite-firefox-feature-keyword-search-bookmarks</link><description>&lt;p&gt;One of my favourite features of the Firefox web browser is surprisingly
unknown and sadly underused. Keyword search bookmarks let you kick off a
custom search of any site straight from the address bar (a.k.a. the “awesome
bar”). For example, if you typed “&lt;code&gt;w hedgehog&lt;/code&gt;”, you could go to
the Wikipedia page for the little critters, or “&lt;code&gt;img hedgehog&lt;/code&gt;”
could show you a cute image search.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is similar to search engine DuckDuckGo’s “&lt;a
href="https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html"&gt;!bang commands&lt;/a&gt;”, except you
can define your own new ones and pick whatever keyword you like, instead of
being limited to pre-defined ones.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can set up a new search by right-clicking on any search field (try &lt;a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org"&gt;the one in the top-right on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) and
selecting the context menu option “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. In the
dialog that pops up, just pick the shortcut you’d like to use (for example,
for Wikipedia I use “w”).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;video autoplay loop muted playsinline controls width="380" height="290"
  style="margin: 0 auto; display: block; border: 1px solid #ddd; box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #ddd;"&gt;
  &lt;source src="/media/img/firefox-keyword-search.webm" type="video/webm"&gt;
  &lt;source src="/media/img/firefox-keyword-search.mp4" type="video/mp4"&gt;
&lt;/video&gt;

&lt;/p&gt;Alternatively, you can do the same thing by creating a regular bookmark
through the full bookmark manager (not the sidebar) and filling in the
“Keyword” field. In the bookmark URL, put the string “&lt;code&gt;%s&lt;/code&gt;”
wherever you want your search term to appear, and when you trigger the
bookmark search via the keyword, it will be replaced with your query.&lt;p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some of my keyword searches that I use frequently:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;w&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s"&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;map&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s"&gt;Google Maps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;img&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&amp;tbm=isch"&gt;Google Images&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;yt&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s"&gt;YouTube&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;py&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="http://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=%s"&gt;Python docs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;rs&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.html?=All%20crates&amp;search=%s"&gt;Rust docs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;mdn&lt;/kbd&gt; → &lt;a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s"&gt;Mozilla Developer Network&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It’s just super handy to be able to type “&lt;code&gt;map 123 main st&lt;/code&gt;” or
“&lt;code&gt;w echidna&lt;/code&gt;” and get to the right place — especially on a phone.
You can also make great use of this at work by setting up search bookmarks for
your tools; like GitHub, JIRA, internal docs, etc.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe Chrome can also do something similar, but it may involve a few
more steps and configuring a custom search engine — I’m not sure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I hope this feature will delight you as much as it does me!&lt;/p&gt;
</description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 21:55:46 -0400</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">favourite-firefox-feature-keyword-search-bookmarks</guid></item></channel></rss>