The old web rises...

September 25, 2025

Quite frequently, I have ideas that seem to be just a hair ahead of their time. Way back when, when you had to go to one store for records, and another store for books, I thought it would be amazing if you could go to one store for both. Media Play rose up not long afterwards.

As a result of my efforts over the last almost a year, I have been building this website up as, essentially a blog site, but not using the de facto standard of Wordpress. This was a result of my own neglected vanity site being hacked. I decided I didn’t need the overhead of Wordpress, and that a static site had a much smaller “attack surface”. It’s gone together in fits and spurts since January, seeded with a bit of code uploaded to one of my favorite news aggregators called Hacker News. Hacker News is aimed mostly at techies and people involved in startups.

This is the post that inspired me and provided the seed to the site you see now.

In the last few weeks, recognizing that there are apparently a few people who read this thing, I needed to make it easier for them. I add content in a few different ways, as shown by the header links above. To address this, I remembered about RSS feeds, and in the last week I added a RSS feed to the functionality (see the little graphic at the bottom of the page). RSS feeds have fallen out of fashion, but in their heyday they made dealing with disparate sources of information more manageable. In my family, there is a funny story about my mom and several sewing and embroidery guilds that were popping up. My sister became a small-time prophet the day she showed mom’s folks how to use RSS feeds.

Today I read an article on Hacker News that spoke to my own dawning realizations that talks about young people getting into land lines. He references this other post In it, he proposes that we resurrect the old web. Social Media has become as much a burden as anything else in the last few years, and some people are reconsidering their relationships to it.

We still want to share information, but the big corporate interests have inserted themselves into it. This has made it easier for anyone to share… whatever… and it seemed like it was a good thing. At first there weren’t a lot of ads, it wasn’t driven by dopamine like it is now. Over time, through the process of enshittification, it has become something else.

I installed a RSS feed reader on my phone, added my own site, and then started to look around for what else I might want to add. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to find RSS feeds in 2025, but I found one or two and added them.

In his article, Steve suggested creating “feeds” pages to share the feeds that we find interesting and might want to have others find as well.

Maybe it’s time to do that again. I’ll be speaking more on this in future posts.

Coming soon: a feeds page on this site.

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