Explanation of the Ratfactor Feed

Page created: 2025-05-06

The first thing to understand is that despite having a feed, this website isn’t actually a blog.

This is a website. It is hypertext. It is too complicated for linear formats. But we can still approach it a little bit in a linear way, for a treat.

A couple years back, I structured the homepage in chronological order to better highlight what’s old and what’s new. It gives a very "bloggy" feeling. But that feeling is deceptive. While some of those links take you to a single page, others take you to whole sections of the website.

In fact, some of those sections are blogs, web logs, that is, about a particular topic. They run their course and sometimes even conclude.

Usually I post stuff to both the feed and the homepage at the same time. Or sometimes they’ll go on one and not the other. This page, for example, will be going into the feed, but I won’t bother putting directly on the homepage.

The feed isn’t automated. I just add to it manually whenever I feel like it. It’s hand-picked from stuff I’d like to share. I make lots of minor updates to the site all the time, especially in the cards section, and I don’t flood all of those into the feed.

The feed may contain deep links that highlight something specific I just finished within a project.

The feed is the blog

I said this website isn’t a blog. But that doesn’t mean it can’t function like one.

I like being able to "publish" new stuff when I’ve completed something.

And keeping a "web log" of updates is, by definition,…​a blog, right?

I certainly don’t not have a blog, and I know this because people mention reading my "blog".

Why doesn’t the feed contain the full text of the post?

Four reasons:

  1. Not everything I publish on the feed is a simple "post" or article

  2. I like to edit my pages "digital gardening" style

  3. How is that supposed to work, bandwidth-wise?

  4. I’m not harvesting clicks

Those points warrant some explanation:

1. Not everything I publish on the feed is a simple "post" or article

Again, the point of the feed is to let folks know that I’ve put up something new.

Sometimes that’s a post-like article or note.

But sometimes it’s a whole mini-site.

Sometimes it’s even a JavaScript-driven web application. I don’t think you want a web application running in your feed reader. To see something like that, you’re going to need to visit the web site with a web browser.

2. I like to edit my pages "digital gardening" style

Another thing I don’t see mentioned a lot is the idea of editing pages and having the feed reflect the changes.

I have no idea how that’s supposed to work.

I really like the ability to edit, fix, and update pages on the site. Sometimes it’s just some spelling errors. Sometimes it’s a major re-working.

If I were writing articles for a print magazine, I would need to agonize over every word before the magazine went to the presses. But since I have a website, I can publish a page and then fix it later.

By linking to the page rather than embedding it, I can just make my changes and that’s it. Whenever you visit, hours, days, or years later, you’ll be seeing the latest version of the page.

3. How is that supposed to work, bandwidth-wise?

I still consider myself pretty new to the whole feed thing, so I missed out on a lot of the early conversations about them.

There’s one thing I’ve never been sure about: How many items are you supposed to have in your feed? And how big can those items be?

I’ve seen feeds that rotate through the 10 most recent items. I’ve seen feeds that go back to the beginning of time.

The feed file is going to get big real quick if it’s got the full text of every item.

For example, one of the things I posted was the_programming_language_that_writes_itself.html, which is 30,000+ words. That’s a small book. Is that supposed to be in the feed?

By the way, I totally don’t mind if your feed reader fetches the full text of my link (the one I currently use can do that). I’m a big believer in the concept of the browser as a "user agent", something that serves the user, not the site owner. This website still works in the text-mode Lynx browser. Read it how you want!

4. I’m not harvesting clicks

I believe one of the main objections to clicking through to the website from an RSS feed is that you’ll be subjected to tracking and advertising.

RSS feeds are wonderfully low-tech and delightfully free of the surveillance ad-tech that infests the commercial web.

I completely understand the hesitancy to follow links these days.

But you know what? The web is links. I’m not willing to give that up just yet. Staying in silos and not following links is one of the reasons we got into the Twitter and Facebook ecosystem mess in the first place.

It’s a leap of faith to follow the link from my feed. The least I can do is hold up my end: you are not being tracked on ratfactor.com. I have no idea if you visited from the feed or if you visited at all.

(And just to re-iterate the point at the end of number 3: Your feed reader may be able to pull the text from the link for you. Feel free to do that.)

Hello feed readers!

I’m incredibly gratified that people enjoy the stuff on my site enough that they’ve subscribed to the feed. I’ve been terrible about responding to email for over a year now. Having this feed is a way to feel like I’m participating in at least half of a conversation with a lot of people, even if I’m failing at the full duplex of the real deal.

If you’re a feed subscriber and that’s why you’re reading this, then the circle is now complete. The feed about the feed has been fed. Feed your head. Follow the white rabbit.