Feed page

I started using this site as the canonical root of all of my “social” content in 2018, but got lured back into the convenience of Twitter and Mastodon and sort of gave up on that idea. With yet more Facebook and Instagram controversies closing out the year, I had a sudden reminder that I should own my content—not irresponsible corporations like them or Twitter.

Over the holiday break I couldn’t help but think about the concept of a “feed” page on personal sites. I’ve noticed a few folks adopting the concept of posting short notes on their sites, much like tweets. Jeremy Keith is very much the master of that craft with his setup that pushes those notes to Twitter and influenced by that, I set up my own Node powered system that gives me something very similar. It replaces a hodgepodge setup that used RSS and IFTTT that barely worked. With this new, convenient way of posting content, I wanted to provide a user interface and subsequent feed for people to see my updates, so I created a feed page to do just that. Of course, Eleventy made that process a breeze.

The feed page amalgamates my notes and links into a nice paginated feed, like you’d have on a social network. In the longer term, I’m going to implement some web mentions and/or comments functionality, too. I like the idea of us all not needing social networks to interact with each other in a convenient manner. I also think we could have much better discussions when we publish our thoughts on our own sites, rather than the trash fire of Twitter hot takes.

Maybe we should implement feed pages much like we implemented now pages, thanks to Derek Siver’s great idea. Food for thought, certainly.

You can see my feed page, here or subscribe to its RSS feed, here. You can also add your personal site to a big ol’ collection that I have at personalsit.es!

Let’s make 2019 the year of personal sites and the IndieWeb 🚀