This is a tiny break in regular programming just to notify that I’ve updated the RSS feed for this site to include /notes. The main feed used to fetch everything from /journal, /essays, /experiments, and /poetry. I deliberated for a while whether I should make people subscribe to /notes as an additional feed if they are interested, but I had decided that I’ll make it less work for people who want everything.
For people who just want my long-form writing, you can subscribe to this feed instead.
There is a strange bug for people using Feedly: if you simply input “https://winnielim.org” it ignores my html header and keeps fetching my old rss url from the old subdomain where journal used to live, so if you want to make sure you’re getting all my posts, please resubscribe with this url on Feedly: https://winnielim.org/feed/
For people new to RSS, you can use something like Feedly to subscribe to posts, or on the Apple ecosystem there is the very excellent NetNewsWire that is free, and it syncs via icloud to all your devices. A tiny digression: why is NetNewsWire free? I was really curious about it, so I googled, and i turns out the spirit is something really admirable:
I should explain: the app is better — much better — than it would be if it were a for-pay app. If it were a for-pay app, it would be just me working on it instead of this great team of volunteers. There probably wouldn’t be an iOS version at all: it would be Mac-only. The kind of features I don’t enjoy doing, such as the Twitter and Reddit integration (and others), wouldn’t even exist.
And it would be slow going. NetNewsWire 5 would have shipped much later than it did, and NetNewsWire 6 would not have shipped until next year, probably.
Instead, because it’s open source, we have this amazing team of people willing to work on it in their spare time. During a pandemic and everything. They’re bringing you something great out of love, with the goal of writing an app of the highest quality.
We don’t have to rush and Ship Right Now in order to make our revenue numbers. We don’t have to pick feature X over feature Y because we think it will bring in more conversions. We can care about performance and efficiency; we can say no to things that might have made money but that are outside our vision.
– Brent Simmons, The lack of a price tag seems almost criminal
Wow. I’ve never thought of a free, open-source app this way. I’m like really cynical of tech these days but once in a while it still brings the best stories of collaboration. Even the article on “How to Support NetNewsWire” is admirable.
This is a post that would typically belong to /notes, but I wanted to reach out to people who is reading the discontinued rss feed on Feedly that only fetches posts on /journal, which means they may have missed out on posts on /essays and /experiments over the past 2 years. Oh well. I don’t think I have that many readers anyway, but it seems 30 odd people on Feedly may have subscribed to the old feed, so hopefully they’ll see this.
And for those of you who had subscribed all this while, thank you for being with me on this lonely journey.