If you have an internet presence with an RSS feed — and you should — please do yourself and all your readers a favor and use a URL for that address that’s at your own domain. For example, the RSS feed for all my posts to HeyDingus is right here at the domain I own, heydingus.net, at http://heydingus.net/feed.rss.

“But Jarrod,” you interrupt, “I don’t know how to put together an RSS feed that pulls in content from my [website|newsletter|video channel|social media|insert service here]! Won’t my feed URL just point to nothing?”

Oh, my sweet, beautiful, butterfly of a reader, I don’t know how to build that either! But you didn’t let me get to the magic word: redirects. The key is that with a URL and a way to redirect it, you can rule the world. Or, at least, you can make sure your URL will never go out of style. And by “never go out of style”, I mean your audience will never have to go out of their way to follow you as you pack up and move around the web.

All you have to do is dream up a good URL at your domain and redirect it to the feed’s URL provided by whatever service you use to host your stuff. And then that’s where you tell folks to subscribe.

For example, if you run an awesome YouTube channel about using computers better, you might redirect birchtree.me/videos.rss to https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCGYdWR8QUYn88lG0PBeJQ_g. (You can have that one for free, Matt. 😜)

Or if you have an intermittent newsletter chock full of absolute gems about working better with clients, you might redirect lexfriedman.com/intermittent.rss to https://buttondown.email/lexfriedman/rss. (Another freebie just for you, Lex. 😘)

Or, perchance you’re working on your photography and sharing gorgeous shots on that cool photographers-only site, but you want non-members to be able to follow along. Good thing you’ve got martinfeld.info/photos.rss redirected to https://glass.photo/martinfeld/rss.¹ (I know you’re already an RSS wizard, Martin. 🙌)

Okay, but why?

You know how Substack turned out to be a Nazi bar? And how all your favorite self-respecting writers there are now scrambling to figure out how to coax their audience to come with them as they jump ship to another newsletter service? Sure, they can take their email subscribers with them, but what about their RSS subscribers? Who knows how many readers will be left behind because they don’t realize from the goodbye post that they need to subscribe to a whole new feed?

Well, super-cool-domain.com/newsletter.rss would have solved that problem. Their readers’ RSS apps would have just kept chugging along, pulling in posts as usual.

And before that, remember how Revue was unceremoniously discontinued by Twitter and all the newsletter writers there had to find a new home? It would have been a non-issue if super-cool-domain.com/newsletter.rss was already where they’d told everyone to subscribe.

And you know how nobody realizes that you can subscribe to someone’s Mastodon posts via RSS even if you’re not on Mastodon? Enter super-cool-domain.com/mastodon.rss where folks could subscribe to your posts in their RSS app of choice.

Or maybe you recently purchased a cool-as-hell domain name that you want to be your new home on the web. You’re, of course, holding onto the old domain, so super-cool-domain.com/posts.rss can be redirected to cool-as-hell-domain.com/posts.rss without your readers missing a beat.²

The point is that owning the address where your audience finds you is important. It allows you to be mobile, nimble, and without attached strings. It helps you show off all the things and places you want folks to see because you can put all these URLs on your /feeds page. It’s user-friendly in more ways than one (pretty cool how you can make all those URLs human-readable, huh?).

And, again, it means your audience never has to think about how they’re going to get your stuff.

Okay, okay, but how?

Through the magic of URL redirects. Any domain registrar worth its salt (here’s one!) should have tools for this built-in right at the bottom of the stack. Simply go to wherever you purchased your domain name from, and find the ‘Redirects’ or ‘Forwards’ settings. There, you’ll set up the address you want to be your permanent URL, pointing it to the one where the content lives:

Voilá! Now anyone or anything that visits your redirected URL, including apps that sniff out RSS content, will end up in the right place.

You can also usually set up redirects within your hosting service/CMS’s backend. I’ve got bunches of them listed in mine:

Great! Can I earn any bonus points?

I was hoping you’d ask that. Bonus points are awarded to folks who make it easy to find their feeds on their site.

So to finish the job, you should expose each of your URLs — /blog.rss,³ /videos.rss, /newsletter.rss, /photos.rss, or whatever you make⁴ — on a /feeds page and in your meta elements so that they’re both human and machine-findable.

If you do it right, you’ll never receive a “thank you” from your audience because they’ll never again think about how they subscribed. Instead, I hope you’re satisfied by getting one from me: Thank you for owning your RSS links.

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(Inspired by Lex’s dilemma.)

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1. It’s too bad that Apple removed the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from Safari, Mail, and News. Those were ideal places for non-techy people to discover and use RSS.↩︎

2. Or in my case, I switched from Squarespace to Blot and needed my old Squarespace RSS feed (/blog?format=rss) to point to Blot’s new one (/feed.rss). And if I ever move again, I’ll be able to direct both of those to the new host’s address.↩︎

3. Oh, that’s a good one! Hold up, I’ve gotta set up another redirect real quick. Okay, done.↩︎

4. By the way, the URL you set doesn’t have to end in “.rss”. It could be anything, like /subscribe, /follow, or even a subdomain like rss.domain.com. As you can see above, /rss, /feed, and /.rss all get you to my site’s one-true-feed.↩︎

Tips Blogging

Happy New Year y’all! And welcome, Meg; it’s always exciting when there’s a brand-new guest here on the show. 😉 Oh, and let me just say that the lack of dungeon buddy talk in the intro is going to take some getting used to.

🕛🕛🕛

Dan Moren: It’s time for a social media audit. Where, if anywhere, are you putting your social media energy in the year of our lord, 2024?

Well, now, that’s an interesting question. I suppose you could say “The Fediverse”, but I wouldn’t because I quite dislike that term. And yet, it is the word that we’ve landed on to describe the decentralized social web. More accurately, I’m putting my energy into my own microblog at Micro.blog, which also acts kind of like a pass into Mastodon but without all the features. I like its more quiet nature. But all my posts also get sent to Bluesky and I manually crosspost them to Threads. I do that just because you never know which microblogging platform people are hanging out on, but 99% of my engagement happens with other Micro.blog and Mastodon users. I’ve even hooked up an automation so that my Instagram posts automatically get pulled into my Micro.blog and then dispersed from there. I’m also putting more effort into full-sized blogging, which has been great fun.

🕛🕛🕛

Meg: What kinds of subscriptions are you canceling in 2024 and what are you keeping?

Like you, Meg, Amazon Prime’s price increase has me considering whether my wife and I will keep it or not. We live a bit into the boonies, so we rarely get the benefit of 2-day shipping. We don’t watch many shows or movies there. And I don’t want ads nor to pay more to not see them. So 2024 might be the year that we experiment with going Prime-free. I don’t know that any other subscriptions will see the chopping block — I’m pretty good about keeping up with what we’re using and ending the subscriptions for the ones we don’t. I did bump us down to the non-4K tier of Netflix when their price went up too recently, and no one (i.e. my wife) hasn’t noticed… so, cool?

In fact, instead of canceling subscriptions, we’re trying some new ones including Factor and Wild Grain for a little more variety and ease in our meal prep. Where on earth could I have heard about those from? 🤔

🕛🕛🕛

Mikah Sargent: The Apple Vision Pro is rumored to be launching soon. Have your opinions on it changed since its preview, and are you planning on getting one?

I’d say my opinions have changed, and it’s that my excitement for it went from high to higher! Maybe I’m just a cuck for Apple stuff, but the introduction really blew my socks off and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. And yes, if you’ve been following along with me the past six months or so, you’ll know that I’ve been saving my pennies (and dimes, nickels, quarters, and dollars) so that I can order one ASAP.

There are a couple of key things that I can’t wait to do with it: immersive cinema and a virtual Mac screen. My wife has eternal dibs on our couch and living room TV (she’s a PlayStation gamer), and I’m fussy enough that I like to “save” the things I want to watch for the “nice screen”. With a Vision Pro, the “nice screen” can be anywhere I want and it is likely better than any physical screen I could have. I’m hoping to catch up on a lot of shows and movies this year.

As for the virtual Mac screen, I’m excited to try using it as my main interface with my Mac mini. The display I have on my desk is showing its age, and it was never great to begin with. It flickers, the resolution isn’t great, and it just doesn’t bring me joy to operate my Mac on it. I’m hoping that with a crisp virtual monitor in Vision Pro, I won’t have to squint so much at it, and the limited battery life will encourage me to log off and go do something else at regular intervals.

I think spatial computing has a bright future, and I want to be in on it from the beginning.

🕛🕛🕛

Jeremy Burge: What feature do you hope gets included in your phone or computer operating system this year?

Oh boy, sign me up for Dan’s better Siri, Mikah’s photography hand-holding, and your status flags in Contacts, Jeremy.

There are two things that I keenly want to see, possibly due to recency bias, and that go hand-in-hand: I want the rumors of Apple’s on-device LLM-ML-AI-alphabet soup to come true and I want it to supercharge Shortcuts. Craig Federighi once proclaimed that Shortcuts was “the future of automation on the Mac” and that was right about the time that Shortcuts got really buggy and stopped getting the love that I think it deserves. I’m desperately holding onto the hope that the reason the current version of Shortcuts has been falling short is that they’ve been working on a rewrite behind the scenes, possibly one that uses natural language and ML smarts to make creating automations ever easier. As I’ve mentioned before, Shortcuts is my favorite “coding” playground, so I’m nervous about drastic changes, but the current state of the app is untenable.

The first thing I’d make with Super Shortcuts? A workflow that helps me write Alt Text for all the images I post online. I’ve got a tool going that generates Alt Text for those images that get auto-posted from Instagram to my microblog, and it’s super impressive and I think will help make the internet a more accessible place.

🕛🕛🕛

Bonus Topic: What is your most anticipated thing in 2024?

Dan’s right, how are we supposed to follow your wonderful news, Jeremy?! Congratulations!!

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked for an upcoming trip with a buddy to go rock climbing in Red Rocks, Nevada. The weather should be ideal in early spring, the place looks incredible, and we intend to climb some very large rocks. Plus, if we get to take an American Mountain Guides Association course there, it means the trip will get me closer to achieving several items on my Impossible List. (Plus Vision Pro. 😎)

🕛🕛🕛

My Topic: Did you celebrate the New Year with any fun traditions?

My wife and I usually host a New Year’s Eve party with a bunch of friends that we’ve picked up along our journey, but this year we waited a bit late to get out the invitations. That, coupled with the long drive time between here in New York and there in Michigan/Ohio, meant that only one of our friends was able to make it. But we still had a great time because our town put on a bunch of fun local events. We saw an improv show, relished good food and drink, and enjoyed the fireworks show from afar — plus the usual game night while waiting for the clock to tick forward to New Year’s Day. However, this was the first year that I struggled to stay awake until midnight, usually not a problem for me any day of the year, but I was dozing by 11:30 pm. Still, no complaints and it was a good start to 2024.

🕛🕛🕛

Great topics to start off this fresh, new year. Thanks for having me here!

Crashing Clockwise Podcasts

Michael Steeber, in his latest Tabletops newsletter:

For a moment over the holiday break, Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 models were unavailable to purchase in-store and online in the U.S. due to a patent dispute. The disruption led to some very unusual displays in U.S. stores, where it’s a bit more challenging to elegantly remove a product from sale than on a webpage.

Sparse, temporary risers featuring Apple Watch SE and simply labeled “ WATCH” were added to Apple Watch display tables. Demo models were reduced, and the Explore app running on the iPads was pared back to highlight Apple Watch SE.

The Apple Watch Hermès bay at Apple Park Visitor Center was also removed and replaced with a new display featuring recycled Nike bands, though it’s unclear to me if this was related to the ban or simply a change of seasons.

Since Apple appealed the sales ban, more watch models have begun to reappear in stores.

I wonder how many human work hours were put into the logistics of removing all the Apple Watch stuff from stores and the website. It must have been all hands on deck to create the custom risers, change the code of all the iPad displays, swap out graphics, and the countless other inventory management tasks that go unnoticed. It must have been like an unexpected product launch right before Christmas, and then another one a few days later to put it all back.

Woof.

Linked

Through AJ Bourg’s site, I recently become aware of the impossible list:

A bucket list is focused [on] what you do before you die, the impossible list is focused on how you live.

I’ve always found bucket lists to be a bit morbid, so this clicked with me. I like the idea of achieving the impossible. Stretching for things that seem out of my reach. And then triumphantly crossing them off and dreaming ever bigger.

So I made one of my own.¹

I spent some time this morning emptying my brain of the pie-in-the-sky goals I’ve been pushing off to a dark corner in there. There will certainly be more, and I’ll update the list, and write about them, as I continue to dream and achieve the impossible.

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1. And you should too! Oh, how I’d love to see everyone’s /impossible pages filled with their heart’s desires!↩︎

Ever find that your cursor is acting sluggish on screen? Maybe it jumps around slightly but you can’t figure out why. Nothing in software seems to be the issue, and you already tried shaking the pointing back and forth in a vain attempt to knock some sense back into it.

Try something for me real quick: Flip over the mouse, look closely at the little aperture that reveals the laser and lens housing, and pull out the little hair that’s gotten stuck in that hole and is currently obscuring some part of the tracking mechanism. Place the mouse back on your desktop and mouse away in unencumbered glory.

Tips

Following in the footsteps of Tom Whitwell, this past year I bought a house, completed climbing goals, said goodbye to beloved family members, and learned a few things:

1. The proper way to do a kick turn when ski skinning uphill is to (1) Turn your uphill ski to a 90-degree angle to your other ski with the tail at your other ski boot, then (2) shift your weight onto that uphill-turned ski, and (3) swing the downhill ski around as close to the uphill boot as possible. Then, voilà, you’re facing the new direction. [Schorsch Nickaes & Dynafit // youtube.com]
2. If you’re spelling out numbers, you won’t use the letter ‘c’ until you get to one octillion. [@HaggardHawks // twitter.com]
3. Truckers are typically paid by the mile, without overtime pay, which means that inspections, traffic jams, bad weather delays, and cargo loading go uncompensated. [David Zipper // theverge.com]
4. Those beautifully delicate ice tendrils coming from the ground and stems are called frost flowers. [gardendesign.com]
5. Pete Schoening saved five of his climbing partners from falling off K2 in 1953 using a hip belay and an old ice axe. That ice axe is on display in a museum and known as “the holy grail of mountaineering artifacts.” alpinism. [Grey Satterfield // americanalpineclub.org]
6. The gallbladder is a lot higher in one’s body than I expected. [wikipedia.org]
7. Chameleons in the desert will turn half their bodies black and the other half white to regulate their temperature by reflecting the suns rays on one side while absorbing heat on the other. [Muntaseer Rahman // acuariopets.com] (Via Tiny World)
8. Gravity on Earth is different depending on where you are in the world and it also changes by the month. [Laura Naranjo // earthdata.nasa.gov] (Via Hard is Easy)
9. The shortest postal address available in the UK might be just a number and postal code. Also postal codes sound more sensible there. [vladh // microblog.vladh.net]
10. Hand dryers feel cold at first because of the evaporation. xkcd.com
11. There are terms for roles in conversations — givers and takers — and how they interact with each other can lead to engaging conversations or ones that just fizzle out. [experimentalhistory.substack.com]
12. 1 in 20 Americans own an assault rifle. This means in my relatively small, quiet town of roughly 5,000 people, there could be 250 military-grade weapons of unthinkable destruction in the hands of God knows who. It’s a sobering and terrifying fact. [washingtonpost.com]
13. The Lindy effect is the idea that the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to stick around. i.e. The pyramids have been around for much longer than the building down the street and are likely to outlast it. [wikipedia.org] (Via Thoroughly Considered)
14. The ZIP code wasn’t introduced in the US until 1968. [guides.loc.gov] (Via Matt Birchler)
15. “The ‘brown’ in brown noise is not a colour, but a reference to sound that mimics Brownian motion, the movement pollen makes in water, identified by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827.” [Emma Beddington // theguardian.com]
16. Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. [thoughtco.com]
17. The biggest snowflake ever recorded was a whopping 15-inches wide! Can you imagine a storm with flakes that big?! [Khushboo Sheth // worldatlas.com]
18. Netflix’s DVD mailing service account(ed) for 1.3% of all mail in the US in 2009. [USPS // link.usps.com] (Via The Verge)
19. Fear Factor, a show I used to enjoy as a kid, was initially hosted by Joe Rogan. Yes, that Joe Rogan. [en.m.wikipedia.org]
20. “Eternal return is a philosophical concept which states that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity.” [wikipedia.org]
21. Lasers are cloned photons all traveling at the same frequency. [Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell // youtube.com]
22. The atmosphere rotates with the Earth, which is why airplanes don’t fly faster or slower depending on if they’re going with or against its rotation. (I conceptually knew this, but having an explanation for why helped it click.) [Mark Rober // youtube.com]
23. NYC’s skyscrapers are so heavy that they sinking the city by 1-3mm per year. Not great when sea levels are also rising. [Sebastián Rodríguez // theverge.com]
24. Frogs’ spit is a non-Newtonian substance. [@simplebiologist // instagram.com]
25. The very first podcast feed enclosed a Grateful Dead song. [Eric Nuzum // podnews.net]
26. Hugh Laurie provided Lin-Manuel Miranda with the inspiration for the “You’ll Be Back” song in Hamilton. [goodreads.com]
27. In Bulgaria, shaking your head up and down vertically means “no”. That kind of breaks my brain. [Keith Broni // blog.emojipedia.org]
28. Way more actors make less than $40,000 per year than the general public. And way fewer actors than the general population make as much in each annual income bracket until you get to $160,000+, but even still it’s about even with everyone else. [American Community Survey]
29. Not yawning can indicate a lack of empathy for other people. [Jennifer Golbeck // psychologytoday.com]
30. The USA has over a billion square feet of unused office space. If put into a single skyscraper, it was extend past the atmosphere and northern lights. [Dorothy Neufeld // visualcapitalist.com]
31. Some of the first turn-by-turn navigation devices were made on turntable-like discs that rotated along with the direction of your vehicle. [Larry Printz // arstechnica.com]
32. It might take 40,000 years for a photon to escape from the sun even to just begin its interstellar journey. [Via kottke.org]
33. The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in the last 20 years of disasters. [Damian Carrington // theguardian.com]
34. There have been approximately 4.5 x 10^27 (4,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) animals ever on Earth. [livescience.com]
35. You can’t laser etch color into aluminum because it’s a raw element but you can with steel because of the iron in it, which will etch at different colors depending on the temperature of the laser beam. [WIRED // youtube.com]
36. Companies will put images of more fragile items, like flat-screen TVs, on their shopping boxes to encourage more delicate handling by delivery workers. [Paul Kafasis // onefoottsunami.com]
37. A “mackerel sky” is the one that looks like a thin, barely-there layer of clouds dotting the sky like a ceiling. [wikipedia.org]
38. 1 out of 4 animals we raise for food are never eaten. To the tune of 18 billion animals as food waste every year. [Kenny Torrella // vox.com]
39. Earth’s human population crossed 8 billion people this year. [axios.com]
40. There is a gas-powered compressor bolted to the sheer face at the top of a Patagonian mountain. [ragnilecco.com] (Via Climbing Gold)
41. Some TV stations switched from black and white to colored video while live on the air. [Back to the Past // youtube.com]
42. Instead of growing in popularity as the synthetic meat industry advanced, it’s actually seems a sharp decline lately. [Megan Hernbroth // axios.com]
43. Someday, oceanic explorers will be able to go visit the wreckage that once was the (currently operating) International Space Station at Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean. [Katie Hunt // cnn.com]
44. Every letter in the English alphabet can be silent in a word. [dictionary.com]
45. Shipping things to Puerto Rico should cost the same as shipping to other states, but some businesses categorize it as “international” which means residents pay more unnecessarily. [Jose Munoz // heydingus.net]
46. Apple literally buried thousands of dollars worth of Lisa computers rather than sell or support them after the Macintosh came out. [William Poor // theverge.com]
47. Replacing a light switch is way easier than I expected it to be. [Lutron Electronics // youtube.com]
48. You might be able to calm your cat down for a successful grooming and nail trimming session by holding their scruff. [vet.osu.edu]
49. New Caledonian Crows make intricately-shaped stick hooks for pulling out bugs from inside logs. [Ze Frank // youtube.com]
50. A double-loop bowline on a harness makes an excellent and redundant rappel extension. [John Godino // alpinesavvy.com]
51. People have made adaptive legs to replace lost limbs, but specially engineered to be great for rock climbing — such as ones with the ability to stand on dime edges. [climbinggold.com]
52. The ocean’s saltiness comes from minerals dissolved from land rocks by slightly acidic rain and are delivered by rivers. [Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell // youtube.com]

If you’ll allow me a moment of introspection, I’d love to offer my thanks at the end of the year to anyone and everyone reading these words. I’ve been writing here on HeyDingus for three years now, but it’s only been in 2023 that I feel like finally hit my stride. I wrote the most posts yet in a year (by a lot!), and, back in November, I crossed 500 total posts written.

Getting to offload my weird thoughts, opinions, ideas, and creations out to the world is a privilege, and for some reason, many of you decide to read them. So many that I reached a completely arbitrary goal — one I made long ago — at the end of this year: over 10,000 views on my site for each of the last two months! 😮 I don’t write to chase those numbers, but I won’t lie — I think it’s pretty cool to reach so many people. And it feels good to meet that goal and move past it, in every sense of the phrase. 🎉 The best part is Tinylytics tells me that my home page has consistently been a top destination. I love that people still visit home pages to read their sites.

No, the actual best part has been the conversations and connections I’ve been fortunate enough to make through this site. If you’ve ever sent me an email, know that you made my day. If we’ve chatted on Micro.blog or Mastodon (or, yes, even Twitter when it still was), know that you’re part of a community I’ve come to cherish.

Thank you for your service, 2023. And here’s to 2024. May it be our best year yet. 🥳

Blogging

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ 22

2️⃣ 28

3️⃣ 7

4️⃣ 3

5️⃣ 38 15

6️⃣ 42

7️⃣ 69

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Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

Presented without sanitization or explanation.

Adios, 2023! 🎉

Gear

I’m chatting with Austin for the PenPals project this month. Here’s a peak at our final exchange, as summarized by ChatGPT:

Austin expresses his preference for refraining from online conversations if he doesn’t have something constructive to add, emphasizing the potential implications for employment. He discusses geopolitical developments and advocates for knowledge over impulsive action. Regarding his skills, Austin considers software/business consulting due to his ability to evaluate ideas. He clarifies his stance on the term “enthusiast” and describes his interests as broad but not deeply committed. Reflecting on the cease-and-desist experience, he acknowledges its role in leading him to platforms like Mastodon and Matrix. In his response, Jarrod shares his approach to online interactions and highlights the benefits of Micro.blog’s conversational focus. He appreciates Austin’s understanding of the term “enthusiast” and discusses how challenges, like the C&D from Facebook, can lead to positive outcomes. Jarrod concludes the pen pal exchange, expressing gratitude for the depth of conversation and wishing Austin the best in 2024.

Read the entire conversation →

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If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.

PenPals