Hacker News Reader

Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

At one point I used wordpress as my blog but then I moved to just using GitHub README.md as my tech ideas journals.

The idea is I don't need a RSS feed because I publish 100-800 entries in one README.md file, then announce that batch of items (samsquire/ideas samsquire/ideas2 samsquire/ideas3 samsquire/ideas4 samsquire/ideas5)

In other words, a batch of entries is already a feed, because it's just a big document and that document should be immutable when I announce it finished.

To append to a journal, I append to the bottom. To append to the blog, I prepend to the top.

Low tech but it really encourages me to write down my thoughts.

View on HN

It works fine, as long as you don't care if anyone reads it; Not all writing is for other people.

If a blog like thing doesn't have RSS, and it's good, then I think "shame I'll never see anything this person writes ever again".

I think there is a market problem of attention. Search engines, advertisements, social media attempt to solve it. There is also the problem of unsolicited sharing or spam. How do you find the good stuff without reading through lots of stuff you don't want? You curate RSS feeds is one solution.

If you don't want to invest in seeking that author again into something you were freely getting that was good, then the sad outcome is the lack of effort/investment on both sides (not providing a RSS feed, not remembering the author's website or name)

See: why open source software is never good enough, even though it is free. See: if you don't invest in your blog/website, why should I invest my time into it?

I have the same problem with GitHub projects. People spend a lot of time creating a wonderful GitHub project (they focus on the code), which is good, but they don't invest in the README.md and create good documentation. So I might star it and forget about it.

If you're creating a GitHub project, please write copious amounts the ideas, mental model and thoughts on the README.md

It's probably entitled because I want to benefit from other's GitHub projects. But when I'm presented with a paragraph about the code, it would be a lot of investment to work out how it is built, how it works, what is useful about it.

Regarding caring if other people read my stuff, I would like people who are interested in the same things as me to read it or to introduce an idea I think has merit. But introducing ideas properly requires exposition. So I need to follow my own advice and create exposition for my thoughts for consumption by others.

This is not about an attention economy. It's not about not remembering your name or website. It's about there being no way to follow you.

Your content needs to be maybe three orders of magnitude better, to have the slightest chance of getting polled.

I would rather write a bot that scrapes your site and creates an RSS feed, than poll it manually.

A blog without an RSS feed is like a restaurant 20km away that's open one random hour a week. The food may be amazing, but I'll never eat there. 167 times out of 168 visits it'll be closed.

So even trying to visit that restaurant sounds like masochism.

If you write a blog, or open source, and hide it in a basement behind a door labelled "beware of the leopard", then it's just cause and effect that nobody will consume it.

It would be nice if there was a webring like mechanism in RSS feeds so that authors can personally recommend other RSS feeds. With a smart enough RSS reader, it can act as a simple web crawler finding potential feeds to recommend to the user based on recommendations of other RSS feeds.

> How do you find the good stuff without reading through lots of stuff you don't want?

Finding and following are two different things.

I can find / stumble upon interesting sites in any number of ways. But if I am interested, do you expect me to remember your URL? To remember to regularly to type in a URL and see if there are new posts?

I have NetNewsWire to inform me of new posts, so unless you show up there, life is too short for manual checking.

But do I want you as one of my readers, as the article suggests?

Not that I"m specifically picking on you, but I'm just seeing a lot of statements in the article and no data. It's "all hat, no cattle," so to speak.

Like I said, not all writing is for other people.

Hey Sam, as a counterpoint I'd really love if your ideas were somewhere with an RSS feed. I'd immediately add it to my Feedbin account

(I'll reply to your email in a bit, was a little busy these days)

Thanks sph!

Maybe I'll write a markdown heading to RSS script?

IIRC it's not hard to subscribe to the commit log over RSS. I'd suspect the commit log might resemble the progress of the notes? One idea per commit, maybe?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com