I thought it was about time to start up a graphical RSS feed again. I have been looking for a place to begin writing out my random thoughts that didn’t involve a data silo like Facebook or Twitter. I will still post on those types of networks, but sometimes you just want to own your own data.
I originally looked at Mastadon but the cost and hassle of running my own instance just seems like a royal pain. I know I could join an existing instance but; been there, done that. When Mastadon had it’s original surge I joined one of the top rated instances… and then that instance left the Internet. Which means my old account with all my followers and such went with it. The thought of starting over when nobody I personally know uses Mastadon seems too steep a hill to climb.
The next option I looked at was a project I had heard about a long time ago, Cartulary. They are building a social network upon RSS feeds. So you could simply subscribe to the feed url of anybody you wanted to follow and their social media posts would show up in your feed along with more traditional RSS articles and posts. I really like the idea but then I would be back to installing and managing a new piece of software.
Which brought me full circle back to just posting an old fashioned weblog with a full content RSS feed. If you want to hear my ramblings, you can simply add my feed to your favorite RSS reader. And when it is all said and done, I still control the data that is posted. Seems perfect to me. The only thing missing is some way to have friends add comments but that can happen later.
The other fun part is I decided to build this weblog using Hugo along with the awesomeness of Github webhooks. So to add a new post I only need to push a commit to my master branch and it will get automatically deployed to this website. (Well, it should. This post will be the test run of the entire process).