2023-09-20 To have a feed or not?

Oddmu doesn't offer a feed, so the feed this site has is hand-written.

Oddmu

A feed is ideal for news. Chunks of information that arrive over time. Like blogs, that are written an entry at a time.

A feed is a dubious addition to a digital garden or a Zettelkasten. Yes, the ideas can be put in a chronological order, but “following along” is perhaps not the most efficient way of following along.

Consider this: Perhaps "following along" is something only co-authors want to do and therefore it can happen elsewhere. Co-authors should have coffee breaks together or hang out on chat somewhere instead of subscribing to each other’s feeds.

In this way of looking at it, writing a wiki page is like authoring a paper, alone or with others. Things only need to be in a feed is when they are "done". And sometimes these texts are never really “done and done”. How is that going to map to a simplistic feed model? There is bound to be a mismatch.

The requirements for regular readers are different. They can find announcement elsewhere, when pages are "done". On social media, for example. On a blog.

This raises two questions. For one, apparently the divide between author and reader is real. For a while, the wiki dream seemed to be that there is no difference. The fact that this no longer seems to be the goal is disheartening. And furthermore, what happens when the wiki is a blog?

For this blog-wiki, the feed is generated by an external script, with the pages to include selected manually.

an external script

​#Oddµ ​#Blogs ​#Wiki ​#Feeds

The difference between the list of changes and the index is that the former tracks edits and additions to all pages, moving a page back up to the top when something was changed, where as the index only tracks the creation of *new* pages starting with a date. The former is the “wiki view” and the latter is the “blog view” for this site. Both of these come with a feed. When editing pages, I can specify whether the change counts as "major" and is added to changes. Typo fixes don't merit such an addition, for example.

changes

index

changes