The start of an overhaul

This is an RSS only post. Check out the RSS Club to learn about the (open) secret.

TLDR: I’m making a tweak to my RSS feeds:

• feeds.xml will contain everything, including daily notes and longer posts
• feeds/essays.xml will have only the longer posts in case the main feed is too noisy

Over the past month or so, multiple people have asked me about copying my site’s theme. Unfortunately, there is no theme to copy, only a bunch of duct-taped together hacks and ideas.

Combining all of my posts into a single RSS feed is the first step in a big refactor that I hope will turn into a cleaner, more abstractable version of this site that others can use as an open source design template.

My notes were a Jekyll collect — it seemed like a good idea at the time, I wanted to test out daily microblogging without blowing up my main feed.

Nearly every design decision was a “oh lemme hack this on here, just a bit of inline CSS won’t hurt” and now I have a proper mess. Cleaning that up is the next step.

I also want to get my post meta-data under control. Even if it’s not particularly useful for others, I enjoy looking up older posts and the snapshots they provide of me a few years ago.

Biggest lesson learned: never make fun of the front end devs again at work for writing spaghetti code!