How to use this blog efficiently
Hello! This page is on the rules of engagement on this website.
1. "I want to get more content from you, but I'm worried I'll forget about your existence"
Has this ever happened to you? We have a revolutionary new technology to ease your woes: RSS. I use an RSS reader for most of my browsing, and I would highly recommend you do as well! The one I use is Bubo Reader, which I use because it's extremely simple, and can be deployed on your own server. You can also deploy it on Netlify, as seen in this demo. My instance is ~60 kB, but a more extensive and well-styled instance of Bubo Reader can be seen here, weighing ~150 kB. Netlify's free plan gives us 300 credits, and here are the credits for each of the uses we care about:
| Feature | Credit Usage | Quick high-level description |
|---|---|---|
| Production deploys | 15 | Deploying your project to production, build minutes no longer calculated |
| Bandwidth | 10 credits per GB | Data sent out to the internet, such as assets hosted on Netlify or files downloaded from your site/app |
| Web requests | 3 credits per 10,000 requests | Web traffic requests to your site or app, includes page views, API calls, redirects, requests to serverless functions, asset requests |
Using some back-of-the-envelope-maths, assuming that you get under 10,000 requests per month and use up less than a gigabyte of bandwidth1 that leaves us with 20 production deploys. That's pretty good, enough for a reload every 36 hours. I would recommend, instead though, that you just use a bunch of branch deploys instead. It'll be at your-site--your-branch-name.netlify.app instead of your-site.netlify.app, but the unlimited deploys means you can reload your reader however often you'd like! With this new set-up, you get a little over 270 000 page views2 with a hundered kilobyte website, which should be more than enough.
TL;DR Use Bubo. If that seems like a hassle, the creator of this blog environment, Karl Voit recommends NewsBlur. The most reliable feed to use would be the links feed in the sidebar.
(To be continued?)