« Oatmeal

I’ll be the first to admit that I post a lot of disperate stuff to my website. Maybe folks don’t wanna follow it all? Maybe you just wanna follow my link log posts? Now you can!

I’ve added the ability to subscribe to rss feeds for posts with a specific tag. From any tag page, you’ll now find a link that (as of this moment) says “Follow this tag.” Clicking that will expose the tag-specific rss feed.

Do you use blot? Wanna do the same?

3 easy steps:

Step the first

Create a new view to use for the rss feed. I called mine tag.rss.

Step the second

Paste the following code into the newly created view.

Step the last

Access the new view, someurl.com/tag.rss?name=pineapple, where pineapple is any tag you’ve applied to content on your site!

Now that you’ve got a working tag-specific rss feed, expose it to your readers somehow.

As always, huge shoutout to David, the mastermind of blot.im.

Of note: this functionality is currently undocumented and could change down the road.

There is a really great conversation unfolding on micro.blog at the moment about what happens to our digital identities after we die. It is a subject that I find fascination, and one that I’d like to do more work with.

So will happen to this when you die?

A few years ago Tova digitized a collection of poems that her great grandfather wrote. She then got the scans printed and bound as a gift for her mother. This evening, at my mother-in-law’s request, I made a little website of those poems. It was a fun project I was able to tackle in about an hour.

First I uploaded the PDF to archive.org and Google Drive, then I used pdf2htmlEX to convert the PDF into a webpage. I then threw together a little wrapper webpage to make pdf2htmlEX’s output a tiny bit prettier, and published the whole kit-and-caboodle using surge.sh.

In “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1831), Victor Hugo noted that, in the late Middle Ages, printing threatened architecture as the dominant mode for the church to convey cultural meaning. “The book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still.” Put the book and the building together, and you have the potential for structures of almost overwhelming significance.

I’m in love with this. A tumblr documenting a very specific corner of the world.