When I first started using this domain, some 10+ years ago, I've decided to put the blogs into subfolders, not onto the root of the domain (so not on zblesk.net, but on zblesk.net/blog and zblesk.net/sk), and redirect from the root to this blog. My reasoning was the usual, "I might need it later".

Surprisingly, I actually did. 😁 So as of now, the landing page looks like this:

The link to the blog is highlighted, for now.

All of this is a work in progress, by the way - even if progress might be slow. Maybe I'll decide later I don't actually need the landing page, or something.

My new book feed

I've written about how I've ditched Goodreads, taken pains to rescue all my data from their silo, tried Storygraph briefly (even adding it as a profile option for Obskurnee). But SG ended up having many of the same issues, so I just stuck to my homebrew system.

But a few of my bookish friends complained that they enjoyed seeing what I've been reading, and now can't. (Thanks for caring, btw.) So I've built a publicly accessible feed: tadaaa! It lookes like this, at the moment:

The RSS is here.

I generally don't like publishing too much of my notes and thoughts, so this page only contains the basics - the name and author, rating, a short review. The only extra is the fiction/non-fiction categorization, which you can also filter by.

I've thought much about the feed format, eventually settling on RSS. It's tried and trusty, yes, but most importantly - I'm not really convinced there's anything that suits me better? I've seen mentions of JSON feeds for this purpose, but there doesn't seem to be any useful consensus as to their format. (It makes no sense for me to roll my own, since I can count the people interested on what I read on my hands; my stuff needs to fit their aggregators.) There are also Microformats and ActivityPub and OPML, but I don't personally use them (and only follow maybe three people who do), so it's probably not worth the effort.

There are still things to add: permalinks that actually work, for example. 😇 But I'm publishing this already, since for the basic purpose of letting people see what I read, it works already.

Again, if you want to take a look, the link is: https://zblesk.net/books.

Last but not least, a big thank you to Tracy Durnell for chatting with me about these things and giving me helpful pointers. ❣