Blogging is a medium, and within that medium there are styles of blogging – well covered 22 years ago I The Weblog Handbook!

With the death of Web2, I’ve been feeling the need to change my own style of blogging for a while. Make my site/domain the only place I really post to on the Internet.

Over the last few years – Colin Walker quipped in an email a while ago – thejaymo.net is a blog that’s ‘stable with a clear sense of identity’. The reason for that stability has been technical rather than though any design of my own.

For as long as this blog has existed, I’ve used the Jetpack plugin to generate an email version of my posts that gets zapped to people subscribed via email as a ‘newsletter’.

But the definition of newsletters and what is expected from an email subscription/notification has changed dramatically over the last half decade. And along side that cultural change, so has changed the number of people subscribed to this blog via email. As my email list grew, so did my anxiety about the sorts of things I was writing and posting to my blog.

Peoples inboxes are a private space and should be respected. I didn’t want to suddenly change my ‘communication style’ and flood people’s inboxes with emails when they had come to expect a certain stability of receiving my podcast, weeknotes + other occasional posts via email. That just felt like a massive breach of trust.

BUT! Jetpack have just introduced a ‘post only‘ function! Which – with this test post – should mean that this post should only appear on my blog and in my RSS feed, and not get zapped into peoples inboxes.

For people subscribed to my blog via email, nothing is going to change. The stable cadence of podcast and weeknotes emails will be maintained. The only major change will be the addition of a new section to my weeknotes, linking to posts I’ve made (if any) during the week.

But for those of you subscribed via RSS there’ll be more casual posts from me incoming. Bare with me as I develop and explore what I want to do.

RSS Club started on the Indieweb in late 2022, with Dave Rupert leading the charge:

Congratulations on joining a secret society! If you’re reading this, that means my message has been transmitted successfully. This post is only available to you, Reader, through the ancient peer-to-peer syndication medium of RSS. I hope you are enjoying reading it in your Web 2.0 era feed reader.

RSS club has some rules:

1st rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Talk About RSS Club”.

2nd rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Share on Social Media”.

3rd rule of RSS Club is “Provide Value”.

Don’t talk about it. Let people find it. Make it worthwhile.

But I’m not exactly one for rules:

Some RSS Club bloggers hide their RSS only posts from the front end of their site entirely. I won’t be doing that.

And as always, if you ever see anything of value here feel free to link to it or share it!

What RSS Club (for me) really means, is a bifurcation of my online readership into newsletter subscribers and rss subscribers.

Long time bloggers (You know who you are) are reading this in your RSS readers right now probably thinking: *wait what Jay’s making a big song and dance about posting more on his blog and the big deal is that some of those posts won’t be sent out as emails ?*

And you’d be correct. I’M FREE.

Until the the other day, I have been technically unable to post more on my blog without fear of spamming peoples inboxes.

Plus, as long time readers will know I LOVE RSS: Here Are Some Posts About RSS. At the end of the day. I just wanna post more, and having those posts flow out into RSS readers and not into your email. Besides it’s what RSS is for after all, taming the firehose.

RSS is a more casual feed destination than email or social media. It’s lack of stats or any kind of feedback is just what I need now that i’m flying blind on that front. I’ll press publish and it’ll goes out onto the blog and out to my RSS. Nice.

Speaking of RSS. I recently installed Matt Webb’s pretty-feed-v3.xsl on the site.

It’s restyled my RSS/Atom feed, making it friendly for humans viewers. It’s also cool that includes a link to his fantastic resource aboutfeeds.com.

As a totally not technical person I ended up installing Matthias Pfefferle‘s pretty feeds plugin from github and i’m really happy with it.

Anyways, here’s to my new found freedom from email notifications 🍻