Spend long enough time blogging and the phrase "chronologically ascending" is refreshing.
I'll follow your linkblog Mastodon account from my linkblog Mastodon account if you agree to follow mine from yours.
Labour Day Weekend is when web-based software is at its buggiest. Ask me how I know.
Yeah. Also, something doesn’t feel right about that report.
Not even RSS is safe from dickovers: https://discourse.netnewswire.com/t/dickover-in-the-slashdot-rss-feed/372
A great way to learn about what software is being developed for RSS is to follow AboutRSS on GitHub: https://github.com/AboutRSS Once you do that, subscribe to your own private Atom feed of the repositories you follow. It's a bit tricky to find yours, but if you visit https://github.com/ while logged in, view the HTML source, and search for 'priavte.atom'. You'll see activity for everybody you follow, including what they star (that's how I know what AboutRSS is interested in).
This is a good reminder to subscribe to your own RSS feeds. That way, you'll be among the first to know that something is wrong with them. https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/df\_posts\_drop\_in\_a\_forest
Astonishingly great website. Possibly one of the best ever. It’s hard to imagine a single website demoing how bad the web-browsing experience is now, but it's basically perfect. It's infuriating that it's so necessary.
Mostly just hurt feelings.
Imagine if you had to disclose whom and what terms you mute.
The reason I'm not so into AI agents is that there's enough mop-up duty with "if this then that"-style automation. It can't be any better when automation is being done by a lava lamp. Plus the amount of setup is tiring (if not exhausting, since I like that kind of thing).
Do you ever sweat while computing? I don’t have the survey data to prove it, but I think people, when they compute, expend a lot of energy, enough energy to sweat, and that they sweat more than they replenish with water.
Do you ever feel that there are times when your computing setup is “just right”? Like, in the Goldilocks sense. Everything is just perfect, and you don't want it to change, because the number of bugs and annoyances are down to a minimum…somehow? I'm currently not there, but have been there a few days this year.
Speaking of RSS, Marc Weidenbaum is using FeedLand and GitHub to curate an OPML file of electronic music feeds: https://disquiet.com/2026/07/31/electronic-music-rss-starter-kit/
In what way?
Speaking of RSS, if you're looking for the RSS feed of the People and Blogs series, now run by Zachary Kai, it's at https://zacharykai.net/assets/files/feeds/pb.xml
Speaking of RSS, let me tell you the story of Drupal's Aggregator module. I actually don't know the full story of it, just my (extensive) experience with it.
I first encountered Drupal in 2004 when I met Boris Mann (yes, that Boris Mann) and over breakfast at a diner in Vancouver, he said to me "Richard, I want you to know as much about Drupal as you know about Movable Type." I fell in love right away, though this was the era when you had to import MySQL files to install a module. The Aggregator module came with the core of the software, so no database installation needed.
What's the Aggregator module? Well, it takes RSS feeds, pulls them on the schedule you define, and republishes them on your Drupal site. You can see it in action here: https://richard.eriksson.ca/blogosphere We (Boris, Roland and I) ran a site called Urban Vancouver, and every time we encountered a Vancouver-based blog, we aggregated (technically syndicated) it on the site. It got us into trouble every now and then, and we had arguments with copyright holders as to whether they were right about violation (they were) but also whether they benefited from being syndicated (they did). So we asked for forgiveness rather than permission and with experience comes maturity, so I don't know how I'd handle it content syndication (re-publication, not just feed aggregation for personal reading) via RSS would go over today.
But you know what was interesting about the aggregator module? You could categorize feeds. Correction, you can categorize feeds. The "Richard's Blogosphere" link above is a category of feeds that I just give a URL to. And get this: It comes with OPML: https://richard.eriksson.ca/blogosphere/opml so if I were to add a feed to it via the UI, it would get added there. If you were to subscribe to that OPML feed in a "Reading List"-compatible reader, the list of feeds would update as well.
Back in the 2000s (the decade), we had this idea of becoming content DJs, where we would aggregate (pull in) content via RSS, and tag each content item with a category, and it would link to the original URL. Content DJs could take that feed and further "remix" it.
That's an idea that's not dead, by the way. https://justagwailo.com/shared (which has a feed at https://justagwailo.com/shared/feed ), in its heyday, would pull in my "Likes" from around the web. Peter Rukavina (yes, that Peter Rukavina) does something extremely similar at https://ruk.ca/favourites (with an RSS feed!). Drupal is part of the mix there as well, but from what I can tell, it's a smaller part of the mix than my implementation.
Aggregator is now a contributed module, not part of core, as the Drupal core project has both expanded and simplified. I love it so much that I ported it to the fork of Drupal 7, Backdrop, and maintain it.
That we have to do any of this is reason to boycott the entire web. It's not useful anymore. It's actively hostile to us. https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/
I like that you made this a playlist. And on Apple Music no less (if only because that's the streaming service I use). An easily overlooked step is to make a playlist out of a list of tracks people recommend.
Don't lose sight of what you're doing something in service of.
Ohhh, not that ICE.
You mourn the sites where the domain expired, or the DNS is unset, or hasn't been updated in a while, and keep some around so that you can leaf through them (virtually) for nostalgia’s sake, and remove others because you can finally let go of them.
You periodically back up the OPML file of the feeds you subscribe to, just in case you need to switch aggregators or the service suddenly goes defunct.
Speaking of RSS feeds, you periodically go through all of the feeds in your aggregator and see if they are broken, right? And if they are, you update the URLs or just unsubscribe from them, I assume. And if you know what's wrong with an RSS feed (sudden absence, malformed, URL has changed), you contact the author or the publication. And if that doesn't work, you create an RSS feed out of the site using tools like Huginn or NewsBlur (one of its paid tiers has a feature to turn any website into an RSS feed). wouldn't say I've gone as far as Chris Hardie, but I've done a lot of those things.