This is a handmade RSS feed
I have mostly "hand rolled" this site using no LLM's and no javascript. There are downsides to this - copy/pasting the meta data and header/footer etc. for any individual page, writing out HTML elements any time I want to post something new. But the downsides are far out weighed by the upsides - no endless package updates, no need to download or run anything to make it work, you just open a file and there it is. Plus modern IDE's and keyboard shortcuts make editing files super easy.
So when I wanted to add some blog type writing and essays, I was really intrigued to find solutions that I could hand crank myself. I did not want to use a platform like Substack, which profits from nazis, or to have to host a database. There are fantastic indie and open source solutions out there, like Bear blog and Ghost, and I've used decap for Machine Streams before, for which I hosted a 2fa solution so that I didn't have to use Netlify. But I still wanted something a little more old school and easy.
Then I found the amazing artist Everest Pipkin's post about how to handwrite an RSS feed.
In their article, they show how you can setup an RSS feed using just two simple files. It's easy, it's stable and it just works. Ok, I won't be able to get usage stats, hardly anyone uses RSS anymore and it won't get boosted by any algorithms, but that's fine! I am not the next Cory Doctorow. And I can post on social media myself if I want to. And in the mean time, I've learnt something new.