Proud of this new feature

To explain the new feature I just added to my blog, I’m just going to copy/paste what I wrote to my friend.

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So, like, most blogs do this:

site.com/blog/1

site.com/blog/2

Which is fine.

They also load everything in pure chronological order. And that’s fine too. They also do reverse chron feeds. Fine. But that means that when you link directly to a blog post, there’s a list of categories, forward and backward buttons, and so forth. The whole thing is CRUD. Fine.

My goal was that I want to do a firehose to take from lots of different feeds.

And I want everything to get stored away into a single database, so if a feed goes kaput, I don’t lose my data. Because it was all saved in a DB. Woo.

So if I were to make an RSS feed of something like that, where should the links go to? I could point to the original source, like Medium or whatever. But I really want to link to the firehose itself. So the urls can still be:

firehose.com/1/

firehose.com/2/

Even though those two posts originally came from a different place. BUT

I am not writing a blog. I do not want to provide a stream of everything, other than in the RSS. I want to provide a permalink to an essay, and I want that essay to be an island. You can read this essay, but none of the other ones. Why should reading one necessarily have a link to the one before it or the one after it? That’s CRUD thinking.

So I needed a “slug” for the URL, so you can go to

firehose.com/<random string>

So I got it working and I am pleased about it

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If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, try clicking through to the link. In the past, it would have pointed to the permalink on Ghost. But now it’s pointing to my own site. Complete with a visual makeover!

I’m pleased about this, yay me!