Hello, October!
Thu 1 Oct 2026
Happy October! This week we had a couple of rainy days and even a brief thunderstorm… but now the city is back to clear, sunny skies and temperatures of (92°F / 33°C). I’m looking forward to cooler days and for the season to feel more like fall 🍂
I’ve been watching Vampire Diaries lately and it’s such a fun show I’m suprised I hadn’t come across it before! It’s so funny how much I’ve changed my mind on which characters I like and trying to guess the next plotlines. I saw this post online about how vampires become popular around recession times. Perhaps that’s true?
(Salon.com) - Beware the rise of vampire shows. It could mean a recession is looming.
powRSS Editor’s Pick
I made some changes to powRSS too. The biggest one is the Editor’s Pick. Hello! I’m the editor. On this blog and elsewhere I’ve talked about how I think curating content is the way to go in terms of sharing more of the personal web. Voting mechanisms in our circles tend to skew heavily towards technology topics. A democratic web should be welcoming to newbies too, and too much talk of frameworks, servers, static site generators and the like ends up being overwhelming in the best of cases.
All this to say that because the number of blogs on powRSS is quite manageable, I end up reading most of the posts shared. Even when they are in other languages, which I’ve been enjoying a lot. So now some posts on powRSS will feature a golden star. Take those as my personal recommendation for you, the way I’d share a link with a friend when I come across something cool and interesting.
powRSS Mentions
I’m also testing out a new feature called Mentions. This one is a way to track conversations across blogs, as well as links being shared to sites all around the web. I really enjoy those posts that start with “re:” which lead to fun conversations about whatever topic(s) we discuss across our personal sites. Mentions is a simple way to visualize those discussions.
For blogs on powRSS, they’ll show up as conversation threads, and for outbound links (e.g. GitHub and other silos) you’ll see a list of links very much like Blogdex used to display. I learned about it thanks to Richard MacManus and his post What the Internet Was Like in 2001 over at Cybercultural.
Cloudflare
I’m a little sad that some of the blogs using Cloudflare go unseen or have stopped working. Last month I mentioned that Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users. These past weeks I had a great discussion with WinnerWind about Cloudflare and he explained to me why powRSS couldn’t access his blog:
Turns out that Hetzner GMBH’s entire ASN is blacklisted by CF by default. The RayID you provided in the last e-mail turned out to be a huge help in that investigation.
If anyone ever e-mails you about it again, tell them that whitelisting by IP will not work here. I just wrote a catch-all rule to allow all RSS readers to view the site freely. Here’s the rule (to be placed under Security > Security Rules)
(http.user_agent contains "rss")And the action must be “Skip” with all the WAF components ticked. Finally, the execution order must be First, otherwise Cloudflare’s security rules will take over and block your reader. Hope future folks have a smoother time!
I’m so grateful WinnerWind took the time to get this working. If you’ve noticed your blog has stopped updating on powRSS, consider letting RSS readers access it! I’m otherwise unfamiliar with Cloudflare but if I can help in any way I’m happy to do so.
Emacs for Managing this Blog
Lastly, I spent some time with Sublime Text but I inevitably keep coming back to Emacs. I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing more posts since I added a shortcut to generate the markdown files for new posts on Jekyll. That makes it easy to call M-x new-post and get writing. Next on my to-do list will be to come up with something for adding images to posts in Markdown format because it’s still pretty tedious (both to get them in the right folder and also to link them within a post). I also keep forgetting the syntax!!