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How to Use This Blog Efficiently

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This page does explain a few things of this blog on how to use this blog in an efficient way.

Follow My Updates

I highly recommend you to subscribe to updates of my blog via Atom/RSS one of my feeds. By using this kind of technology, you get notified on new blog entries in contrast to «you have to re-visit the page and look for updates». Therefore, it scales much better when you follow dozens of news sources.

Feel free to read my (German) blog article explaining RSS/Atom feeds.

If you have not settled for a feed tool yet, try Feedly which seems to be an easy to use web-based solution which works with all of my feeds. In case you wonder, my personal solution is also described but somewhat more complicated because of my personal setup requirements.

TBD for lazyblorg: feeds for auto-tags such as article language or text size. Stay tuned!

Overview of feed content
Overview of feeds

Now that I have convinced you to use feeds: The URLs you have to use to subscribe to my blog updates are found in my sidebar. I have three different main feeds:

  1. The first one features only the title and a link to my blog article: «links only feed»
    • In case your feed aggregator has some issues with the other two feeds, use this one instead.
  2. The second one features the title and a short teaser text «artile teaser feed»
  3. The last one contains the whole content: «full content feed»

Note: Because of my personal inability to come up with one hundred percent valid feed data, content like embedded Amazon or Twitter snippets may cause some technical issues with certain picky feed solutions such as elfeed. In case of such an issue, your feed might stop working (no new updates) or show some validation error instead.

If you don't want to use feeds (a decision I don't recommend) you could also use a less efficient alternative to Atom/RSS feeds are services like this where you get an email on content changes. The best feed alternative in my opinion is gwene, a feed-to-nntp (Newsgroup) gateway: somebody set up gwene.public.voit for my link-only feed.

On important articles, I usually publish a toot on Mastodon and a tweet using the hashtag #publicvoit you might want to follow on Twitter.

Navigate Using the Tags

Similar articles share one or more tags. Therefore, navigating via tags (clicking on the tags on top of each article) is a neat way to move around on my blog.

If you are unsure how I interpret a certain tag, check out the tag page of the tag (by clicking on the tag). Tags which are important to me provide helpful information on their tag page.

Navigating through the date-based links at the top of each page is possible but not as beautiful until that GitHub feature request is implemented. I recommend navigation through tags and links within pages instead.

Additionally, do not ignore the "Related links" section at the bottom of each article where you can find other articles of mine that link to the current page. That way, you are able to spot articles that are somewhat relevant to the current one.

Use the Search Bar

If you do have certain keywords in mind, search is the most efficient way to look for articles. You can find the search bar on the upper right corner of my pages.

For that, I'm using privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo.

Understand the Different Types of Pages

In lazyblorg there are multiple types of pages:

  1. Entry Page (docu)
    • URL is http://Karl-Voit.at
    • The entry page features:
      • A short introduction to the blog
      • The most recent blog articles and their updates
  2. Temporal (docu)
    • URLs look like Karl-Voit.at/2016/12/31/this-or-that
    • Temporal articles are associated with their publication date which is visible in the URL path
    • (Seldom) updates on temporal articles:
      • They are explained at the top of the article: date and content of update
      • Updates causes articles to re-appear on the entry page and the feeds
  3. Persistent (docu)
    • URLs look like Karl-Voit.at/cloud or Karl-Voit.at/about
    • The page you are reading now is a typical persistent article:
      • Not associated with a certain publishing date
      • Persistent pages get updated frequently (without being featured on the entry page or feeds): adding links, updating content, …
  4. Tag Pages (docu)
    • URLs look like Karl-Voit.at/tags/cloud or Karl-Voit.at/tags/pim
    • On tag pages, you can see all articles which got tagged by the tag
    • Some tag pages do feature a description of the tag, how I use the tag, and what are the most important articles from my point of view
  5. TBD: Navigational Pages
    • Pages for years, months, and days that list all corresponding articles according to their first publishing date
    • Follow this GitHub issue if you want to get updates on this feature.

Related articles that link to this one:

Comment via email (persistent) or via Disqus (ephemeral) comments below: