England day four brings freezing fog and frost on rooftops. And seeing oldest friends tonight at the village pub was an absolute delight.

I love music videos that are just cool walkabouts, don't you? A few of my favorites then.

VNV Nation – When Is The Future?

Bruce Springsteen – Streets Of Philadelphia

The Verve – Bittersweet Symphony

And Of course. Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy

Things that are Englandy. That first drive down super narrow streets again, good heavens. Rain, then. All of it, non stop since I got here. Wouldn't have it any other way, good to be back for a bit.

What happened was, I got on a plane today and flew across the pond.

If you're thinking to yourself, that doesn't look like a great seat, you'd be right. I had king of all elbows to my left. And argues with girlfriend on FaceTime to my right. It was a long flight.

But here I am standing sitting in England again. Where it all started.

Nice surprise for this one to be featured on Flickr Explore the other day.

I mean, I knew cats could snore. But this girl laying on me right now is really going at it.

Hmm. how to stop procrastinating. I'll read that next week.

Molly White, in her excellent review of Chris Dixon's Read Write Own book, made me laugh. Over the years the reports of RSS' death have been greatly exaggerated. And yet people still trot that line out.

Attempts to create alternatives have all failed, he says, before going on to describe several projects that are very much still in use, such as the RSS and ActivityPub protocols, or federated social media projects like Mastodon. RSS is dead, he repeats endlessly throughout the book.

It's profoundly weird to read RSS's obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn't provide a functional feed.

Good heavens reader. The tech you're using to read this very post is . Bummer.

RSS then, fully alive and well in 2024, powering the podcast industry, and keeping the independent publishing flame alive.

I'm reminded of a great post from Giles Turnbull a couple years back on what using RSS feels like:

This post was prompted by a conversation with a 20-something colleague, who had never heard of RSS. I shared the link to aboutfeeds.com, but after reading it my colleague was still baffled. "I don't understand," they said. "Why would you use something like this?" This post is an attempt to answer that question.

It's a really good read. And he's right when he says it's better than the endless scroll of social media.

The only way of moving through hundreds of items on a social media feed is to scroll through everything. Maybe it feels faster, but I don't think it really is faster, because it numbs your brain to input. Your thumb keeps scrolling, but your eyes stop taking things in.

Indeed.

If you're reading this, you already know the virtues of RSS, and nothing here is news to you.

RSS is dead! Long live RSS.

Manuel Moreale with a list of blogging platforms in 2024. It's a good list. I looked into Ghost briefly last year but the comment feature not mature enough.