How It All Connects

📅 10 Jul 2023 | ⏱️ ~3 minute read

There's some automation on this site that posts to various places, all via RSS. Here's how it works.

There are a number of ways to subscribe to this blog you can do it via RSS, email or on social media (Mastodon, Micro.blog or Bluesky). I’ve always been of the thinking that a reader shouldn’t have to go hunting for my content; instead, it should be made available in whatever way makes sense to them.

Problem is, distributing links (or the entire post) to multiple places can be a pain. I’d much prefer to publish my post and let the automation do the rest.

I’m a big proponent of RSS so that’s where I started looking, and in the end RSS has become the backbone of how my content is distributed across the web.

What’s shared, where?

Ok, so here’s a list of where my content is distributed and in what form. All of this happens automatically within a couple of minutes of a new post being published.

I love this setup - all I have to do is publish a post and my RSS feeds do the rest. It’s fantastic. For those of you who are visual learners (I include myself in this bucket) here’s a handy-dandy diagram that I threw together to show how it all connects:

website-setup-diagram

How much does it all cost?

Automation that’s this simple to implement usually costs a lot of money, right? Wrong. All in, this site costs me $18/month to run, and is broken down as follows:

Micro.blog also supports other services that it can cross-post to. Currently Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, BlueSky and Nostr are supported.

I don’t need any expensive plugins, or fancy (read: complicated) code to make this all work. It’s all just RSS, and it’s lovely.

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