cybercitizen4

Hi everyone,

Today I'm sharing powRSS: a public RSS feed aggregator.

powRSS updates daily with new posts from independent blogs and websites. The list of known sites is curated manually, but the feed is generated automatically by picking new sites each month, giving every site a fair chance to be featured.

This goes without saying but this is a non-commercial, entirely personal project inspired by my own use of CAPCOM in Gemini and Bongusta in Gopherspace, as well as old-school website directories back when the web felt smaller.

You can find the feed here: powRSS.com

And you can learn more about the project and background here: https://enocc.com/2025/05/24/launching-powrss.html

If you have a personal website or blog, I would strongly encourage you to leave a comment or send me an e-mail, as I’d love to add it to the public feed.

I hope some of you may find it useful :-)

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I shared a post here about discovering independent websites. I spent the day working on a small prototype for a larger project I'd been working on called powRSS. It's nothing more than a simple RSS finder, reader, and now aggregator.

If you have a personal website or blog, I would strongly encourage you to leave a comment or send me an e-mail, as I'd love to add it to the public feed.

I hope some of you may find it useful :-)

Hey everyone, today I had a fun interaction with a fellow web developer regarding the discovery of independent websites and blogs.

In the /r/frontend subreddit, a writer named Fred shared a blog post titled "Small web is beautiful". One of the things he said which caught my attention was this:

I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together. Whenever I write a longform blog post and share it with the world, I get people recommending me similar reads, which in turn I use to improve the original blog post (and my own personal knowledge). I love it when people challenge my ideas — as that opens my mind to unseen perspectives — and I wish the web was a safe place where this could happen much more often.

Which is pretty much what I love about the web as a medium for communication in the first place!

I left a comment on his blog post saying that the best and most meaningful connections I’ve made on the web have been through finding small independent websites owned by people and emailing them to say hello and thank you if an article was especially helpful or insightful. I also mentioned that I'm a big fan of smallweb search engines and directories like we had back in the day, so he asked me for recommendations.

I ended up writing a blog post on my website collecting some of my favorites and sending the post to him. He looked through my site and saw some of my interests in writing and literature so he sent me a project of his where he's collecting book epigraphs from various authors. Now, here's the fun part: turns out that when he started this project, he had shared and asked for help with the Ruby on Rails community (about 9 months ago) and I had already commented and given feedback on the project! Full circle moment reminding me how small the internet can be 😁

Excerpt:

In an article for Contraption comparing Ruby on Rails and Next.js, Philip I. Thomas writes:

The truth is that the new wave of Javascript web frameworks like Next.js has made it harder, not easier, to build web apps. These tools give developers more capabilities - dynamic data rendering and real-time interactions. But, the cost of this additional functionality is less abstraction.

Using cutting-edge frameworks introduces instability through frequent updates, new libraries, and unexpected issues. Next.js applications often rely on a multitude multiple third-party services like Vercel, Resend, and Temporal that introduce platform risk.

This problem has been exacerbated by developers themselves. I don’t like Vercel, Resend, Temporal, Prisma, or any of the SaaS platforms whose business model seemingly relies on ~~abstracting~~ obfuscating away control of an application by selling their services to new and impressionable developers who hear about them for the first time from their favorite social media personalities. Indeed, all three links in the paragraph I quoted above from Thomas’s article are affiliate links. (This is not to say Thomas is doing what these creators do, I’m just pointing out how deeply rooted this economic model has become).

As an industry, we’ve shifted from the millenial devlog to the YouTube tutorial. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with video as a format, the incentive for monetizing content makes developers-turned-creators perpetuate this cycle of overcomplicating software through third-party services, because at the end of the day, advertising these services and not architecting software is what pays their bills.

This trend of aggressive advertisement for a fragmented app ecosystem preys on the ever-present FOMO in the industry. If Meta and Netflix and the rest of the FAANG companies are using the latest technology… why not me?! But FAANG companies solve unique problems for their products, and thus write solutions that work for them. See also: Ruby on Rails is slow and doesn’t scale. When your app reaches a large enough amount of users to bring Rails to its knees, you’re not going to regret choosing Rails, you’re going to laugh and feel proud and incredulous that so many people have found value in your work.

Hi all,

I don’t really know how to ask this question. On one of my devices, I downloaded a web browser (Opera) and one of my friends made fun of me, saying that “you better like China knowing all the stuff you do online”.

I read the Opera website and it says it’s a Norwegian company, but on Wikipedia it does say it was bought by a Chinese company.

My question is: what does “China” do with my personal browsing data? Why is it useful for them? (and who are we referring to here, is that the Chinese government, a private company, who?)

I’m looking forward to learn more about digital privacy, but I don’t currently understand the “obviousness” of how it is wrong to use Opera.

I’m a tech enthusiast (hence why I’m here), but I’m cognizant that I have large knowledge gaps in some of these topics.

Thank you in advance.

Some of my coworkers were talking about using RSS to read blogs, which made some of the younger folks in our team ask what it is and why we keep using it.

Some still use iPods to avoid subscriptions and streaming services, my favorite was one of our sysadmins who showed me Gopher.

I’m curious about others though, thanks!

What kind of websites did people visit? Were people friendly?

Excerpt from Chapter 14 of In Our Time. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1925.

Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.

She worked in Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's, and she was seventeen and had lost a son. The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, spacious and dark, with bath and bidet, the perfect place to live out a few years. The perfect place to write a book of apocryphal memories or a collection of horror poems. Lupe was thin and had legs long and spotted like a leopard. The first time, I didn't even get an erection and I didn't want to have an erection. Lupe spoke of her life and of what for her, was happiness. When a week had passed we saw each other again. I found her on a corner alongside other little teenage whores, propped against the fender of an old Cadillac. I think we were glad to see each other. From then on lupe began telling me things about her life sometimes crying, sometimes fucking almost always naked in bed, staring at the ceiling hand in hand. Her son was born sick and Lupe promised La Virgen she'd leave her trade if her baby were cured. She kept her promise a month or two then had to go back. Soon after, her son died and Lupe said the fault was her own for not keeping up her bargain with La Virgen. La Virgen carried off the little angel, as payment for a broken promise. I didn't know what to say. I liked children sure, but I still had many years before I'd know what it was to have a son. And so I stayed quiet and thought about the eerie feel emerging from the silence of that hotel. Either the walls were very thick or we were the sole occupants or the others didn't open their mouths, not even to moan. It was so easy to ride Lupe and feel like a man and feel wretched. It was easy to get her in your rhythm and it was easy to listen as she prattled on about the latest horror films she'd seen at the Bucareli theatre. Her leopard legs would wrap around my waist and she'd sink her head into my chest searching for my nipples or my heartbeat. This is the part of you I want to suck, she said to me one night. What, Lupe? Your heart.