I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?

So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!

P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

I've copied the full tweet below (it's from August, I missed this news somehow):

We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶

Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!

Why do we like Swift?

First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.

Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.

The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.

Strong ties to Apple?

Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example).

Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.

What happens next?

We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!

No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.

I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞

Nitter link:

https://nitter.poast.org/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Original post:

https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Some of Kling's replies in that thread are also pretty interesting:

My general thoughts on Rust:
- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B
- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs
- Really impressive ecosystem
- Toxic community

In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop.

The September monthly report for Ladybird released the day after I posted this. It provides basically the same information:

This Month in Ladybird September 2024

The section about Swift:

Successor language search progress

Over the past year, our core contributors have been exploring potential safe languages to complement or succeed C++. We evaluated several options, including Rust, Swift, Fil-C, and others. While some languages offered compelling features, many fell short in either C++ interoperability or providing the level of memory safety we needed.

After extensive testing and discussion, Swift emerged as the top choice among our core developers, thanks to the new Swift 6 interoperability features and its growing cross-platform support. As a result, we’ve decided to adopt Swift as our C++ successor language.

That said, this will be an incremental shift. The existing C++ codebase is deeply embedded in the project, and a complete rewrite would be impractical. Instead, we’ll be gradually introducing new components in Swift, carefully integrating them with our existing C++ code over time. Look forward to a dedicated blog post on the topic soon.

Early last year, there were some rather heady predictions within my company about the potential/future of decentralized autonomous organizations. (That a DAO would be running a real company, that a DAO would play an important role in an election somewhere, etc.) They have not come true. From my perspective, the same generally seems to be the case for nearly all Web3 components.

That led me to wonder, though - are DAOs still a thing? Is there quiet potential there and the hype machine has simply moved on to LLMs... or was hype all there ever was?

Have any of you seen any actual uses of a DAO? I would love to hear about it if so.

Edit: Apache OR Nginx? Could someone fix my title - I posted without proofing.

My wife is having half decent success with ecommerce. She's doing great on Etsy and eBay, and now her website is starting to pick up.

It's currently hosted on 20i who pride themselves on being an excellent WordPress and Woocommerce provider, with a half decent CDN. In reality, I think it's pretty shit for what you pay for.

I'm tempted to either grab a VPS or even go as far as a bare metal at a CoLo with public IP and run the full stack myself. If I do, shall I go Apache or Nginx? I've done both and I'm pretty agnostic. OS would be Debian.

Before I go to this length though, does anyone know of a fair priced but good performing Woocommerce platform? She's got hundreds of hours already, the plugins and over 300 products listed, so I'm loathe to move to a different solution, however, I'm not ruling it out.

The reason to not all in on Etsy or eBay is the 25% cut they take of everything. Using a personal site and Stripe payment platform means it's more 1% + 20p for processing.

Ideas, thoughts and suggestions please?

Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Hey there,

Title is pretty self-explanatory, looking for some web camera recommendations, USB obviously¹, good price to value, higher quality the better, microphone not required, but appreciated.

¹ Don't need any MDR-26/SDR-26/CameraLink connectors, or Game Boy Camera recommendations here /s

Hey there everyone,

I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.

Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.

I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.

Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.

My list of comics I read over a cup of tea in the morning is looking a little stale so I wondered what webcomics people like to read on a regular basis. I'm pretty flexible about content types, the only real requirement is regular updates. If I can jump in without reading a shedload of back issues that would be better than not, but for a good series I don't mind putting in some time catching up.

Here's my current list:

Daily-ish updates

• Penny Arcade
• Dumbing of Age
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• Questionable Content

Couple of updates a week-ish

• Mr Lovenstein
• Perry Bible Fellowship
• My Gums Are Bleeding
• War and Peas
• The Jenkins
• False Knees
• Extra Ordinary Comics
• Sarah's Scribbles
• Loading Artist
• Buttersafe
• Poorly Drawn Lines
• Cyanide and Happiness
• Wondermark
• XKCD

Might be dead

• Extra Fabulous Comics
• Weregeek
• The Pigeon Gazette