2022 was a year of distrust.

Everyone distrusts “the other party”. No one trusts the government or the media.

Crypto was revealed for the scam it so obviously was.

Elon Musk bought Twitter and ravaged it. Or saved it, depending on your political leanings.

Facebook, I mean Meta, Faceplanted with the Metaverse. A name they stole from Neal Stephenson without credit, by the way.

ChatGPT taught us that AI can write extremely convincing gibberish almost instantly.

So what are we to do?

Bring Back Blogging!

One initiative is to bring back blogging and RSS Feed Readers.

It is truly frightening how easily our opinions can be swayed by the algorithms of social media sites that are geared not to inform us or entertain us, but to engage us so we will continue consuming their ads. The more we argue and fight, the more we refuse to stop scrolling and thereby consuming their ads.

So how about we go back to algotrithm free browsing? Back to a time when WE chose who we wanted to hear from and what we wanted to read.

The Bring Back Blogging website is encouraging people to do just that. They are asking for bloggers to commit to publishing three posts in January 2023.

I've submitted both this site, Galactic Beacon, and my other site jeffa.tech.

Even though I'm posting this post on both sites, I'm only counting it as one post, for those who are keeping score.

If you aren't familiar with the idea of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it is just a way for a website to publish a list of all of its content in an easy to read way so that you can subscribe to your favorite sites and get updates when they publish fresh goodies.

What it means for Galactic Beacon

My plans for Galactic Beacon revolve around sharing my photography and the occassional comic with a few other bits and bobs sprinkled in.

What it means for jeffa.tech

For jeffa.tech I plan to continue writing about software development topics. My focus at the moment is the blog engine that powers both sites. For this challenge, I had to add an RSS feed. Since the blog engine (GatorSmile CMS) is based on C# and dotnet, I used Microsoft's syndication library to quickly add an RSS feed.

It was fast to implement, but it does NOT allow you to put actual web content (HTML, CSS) in the post. It nerfs the tags and makes them visible. Yuck.

So I'll be writing about the process of hand rolling my own RSS feed over the next month or so (he said hopefully).

Let's Do It!

I've been spending more of my time on Mastodon and less on Twitter.

I have an order of magnitude fewer connections on Mastodon, but so far the interactions have been drama free and downright pleasant.

Who wants to join me on this journey to take back control of our own experience?