on that date / or this...
I think I've found a way to be comfortable publishing syndication feeds for the or this archive website. This is what I wrote about my reluctance in the last post announcing the site:
There aren't any sort of RSS or syndication feeds yet and I am still deciding whether there will be. The orthis site is meant to be more an archive than a publication or a daily feed. It's meant to be a patient place to find or reference an image in a future measured in weeks or months or years rather than something to be consumed in the moment.
That doesn't need to preclude things like syndication feeds but I am no less prey than the next person to the desire for immediate response and gratification, and the bad habits that desire fosters, when sharing something online. The decision not to broadcast updates yet, or even to commit to any kind of a schedule for updates, is an attempt to take a deliberate step back from that behavioural orbit because it seems to do more harm than good these days.
Rather than publishing new drawings in a syndication feed I've set things up to publish an on this day
style feed. The feed will be regenerated every day and contain pointers to drawings that were done on that day in past years. I like this approach because it emphasizes the practice of revisiting things. I like it because it fosters a relationship between drawings over time.
On this date
is a pretty arbitrary, and pretty meaningless, framing device but it's still a good device so I'm going to stick with it for now. It reminds me of the short-lived oh yeah that website that I ran for a time in 2014. Writing about it, I said:
The belief that a tool needs to be greedier and greedier of a person's time and attention in order to... well, that's the question I suppose. The net result are tools that, whatever the motive or lack thereof, feel like their sole aim is to become the activity rather than complementing the things people are already doing.
There should be drawings enough already to fill every day in the calendar (except today, as it turns out...) so that will take care of the year to come. With any luck there will enough new drawings from the rest of this year, and years to come, so that every day the past has something new to say.
You can subscribe to the feed here:
This blog post is full of links.
#date