Andy

Is there a RSS revival going on?

Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz, staff writer for The Atlantic on Internet culture, posted this on Twitter: (UPDATE 12/17/2018: Twitter post was deleted, here are links to Google search cache and offline copy)

Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed?

This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with recommendations for feed reader apps and generally using RSS. I added my own reply for rivers of news.

Next, a post from Cal Newport (saw this via Brad Enslen):

As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.

Wow! This from a person who acknowledges that he does not participate on social networks, but lets it slip that he uses RSS!

Case in point: I’ve never had a social media account, and yet I constantly enjoy connecting to people, and posting and monitoring information using digital networks.

Finally, Brad Enslen has a series of posts dealing with blogging, social media and RSS:

What do you think?

Catholicism in the Culture – Jeopardy and Blue Bloods

As a Catholic, I like seeing instances in media that reference my faith. One regular contributor is the quiz show “Jeopardy”, which regularly features religious categories in the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy question rounds. Yesterday, the Final Jeopardy category was “Catholicism” with this question:

A liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the feast day of this “first apostle”

The answer is “St. Andrew”, which is neat, since my name is Andrew, and the feast of St. Andrew is today (November 30th)! Alex Trebek even referred to the feast day – neat again! By the way, no one got the right answer in Final Jeopardy….

The other prominent example is the TV series “Blue Bloods” on CBS. The main characters, the Reagan family, are practicing Catholics, and their faith definitely guides a lot of the development of the characters. One of the supervising producers/script writers, Siobhan Byrne O’Connor, is a practicing Catholic, and brings the faith with her in script development. The executive producer, Kevin Wade, is also Catholic and writes the dinner scenes where the Reagan family says grace before meals and discusses the issues of the day. I am glad that there is still a place for Catholicism in today’s media world.

 

Lengthy article on EM drive research at Johnson Space Center in Houston TX (NASA Eagleworks) (via https://www.eeweb.com/profile/max-maxfield/articles/impossible-space-drives-and-interplanetary-transport-networks) – hope this turns into something good!

I am helping Ron Chester with setting up a river of news on Bob Dylan, but some of the sites of interest do not have RSS feeds. This looks like a straight-forward example that could be used for those sites, I will try it out!