Ratfactor's "RSS" (Atom, to be precise) feed

Page created: 2021-07-02
Updated: 2025-07-05

Well, it took years and I’m a late-comer to this, but I finally had enough requests for an RSS feed for this website to start one. It’s incredibly gratifying to know that people enjoy my content enough to want updates when I’ve added new stuff!

What’s in the ratfactor.com feed? I’ve expanded on this a bit here:

Explanation of the Ratfactor Feed

Update five months later: I love it. Having a feed has made me more likely to write more often. This, in turn, has made me happier.

Three years later: Continuining to be a big fan of RSS! And I’m finally updating this page.

Here’s the feed: rss atom.xml rss

(There’s also a link at the top of every page.)

I’m hand-writing the feed for now and have found this syndication page on atomenabled.org to be a very readable guide to the format.

I’ve also validated the feed with the W3C Feed Validator.

w3c feed validator valid atom 1.0 badge

I’ll probably (semi-)automate its generation in the future. (Update: adding feed items is now sort of automated by the Perl script I use to sort of manage this website.)

Creating and consuming :-)

I love the concept of RSS and I’ve attempted to use it to follow other websites several times. The last time was shortly before Firefox removed support from the browser. :-(

So now that I’ve created a feed, I’m also going to give using RSS feeds another shot. I’ve been using Thunderbird for email for a while now and, of course, it has feed reader support. This will also be a great way to make sure I’m keeping my own feed up to date (and formatted correctly).

Update two weeks in: Really enjoying using RSS. Having the feed reader right there with my email means I actually check on feed updates.

Update five months later: I now consider my feeds in Thunderbird to be my own little personal social media platform. It’s all high-quality content tailored just for me and completely free of any form of advertising and tracking. I should have done this a long time ago.

Update three years later: The only problem with using Thunderbird as an RSS reader has been syncing feeds across computers.

Update four years later: Now I use Feeder on my Android phone for pretty much all of my RSS reading. RSS gives me much higher quality reading than doomscrolling social media (and in February 2025, all scrolling is doomscrolling).

Feeds I follow (sorta like a BLOGROLL!) (many are programming-related)

(In alphabetical order by full URL because I just select the list and do :sort in Vim.)

  • Dan-Simon Myrlands personal blog space (pspodcasting.net) RSS - Some incredible UNIX deep-dives (Check out the Console Desktop Guide, for example.)

  • Mike Grindle (mikegrindle.com) RSS - Super delighful personal blog with some great tech-adjacent writing

  • Rachel (by the bay) (rachelbythebay.com) RSS - Fantastic tech explorations and war stories.

  • 0x30.dev (0x30.dev) RSS - Tech, learning, and life

  • Alex Williams (a1w.ca) RSS - Microcontrollers, Linux, Forth, etc.

  • Andrew Kelley (andrewkelley.me) RSS - Zig language’s creator, tech and non-tech blog.

  • Jeff Atwood (blog.codinghorror.com) RSS - The one and only Coding Horror

  • Dan Luu (danluu.com) RSS - Deeply researched software engineering posts, etc.

  • David Brin (davidbrin.blogspot.com) RSS - SF author talks about books, writing, and politics

  • Drew DeVault (drewdevault.com) RSS - Open source advocacy, hacker culture, programming, etc.

  • Eli Oat (eli.li) RSS - Alternative programming languages, family life, etc.

  • Julia Evans (jvns.ca) RSS - Just wonderful learning in public and explanations of technology - Julia Evans is someone who actively makes the Web and the world better, period.

  • Kottke (kottke.org) RSS - One of the oldest blogs on the Net.

  • Ploum (ploum.net) RSS (EN) - Excellent musings about offline computing and online computing.

  • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net) RSS - Linkdump and commentary

  • Nikita Prokopov (tonsky.me) RSS - Programming and UI design.

  • Laurence Tratt (tratt.net) RSS - Great variety of posts on general programming topics.

  • Wil Wheaton dot Net (wilwheaton.net) RSS - The personal blog of "just a geek."

  • 404 Media (www.404media.co) RSS (paid subscriber) - Indie tech journalism!

  • Andrew 'bunnie' Huang (www.bunniestudios.com) RSS - Legendary electronics engineer, hacker, and researcher

  • Carl Svensson (www.datagubbe.se) RSS - Retrocomputing, Amiga, general tech commentary

  • David Revoy (www.davidrevoy.com) RSS - Artist of "Pepper and Carrot" web comic, open-source software advocate, and all-around awesome human being.

  • Viktor Lofgren (www.marginalia.nu) RSS - Excellent blog by the creator of Marginalia Search!

  • Jake Bauer (www.paritybit.ca) RSS - Awesome variety of tech postings

I don’t know if Justine Tunney has an RSS feed anywhere, but it’s always worth checking her site for updates: https://justine.lol/ (Incredible, fascinating, and fun programming projects and excellent write-ups.)

I have also read Steve Yegge for years across various blogging platforms and though I can’t point at an RSS feed now, I did create the Yegge-Dex!