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Matt Webb answered all my questions

I had some unanswered questions.

Matt Webb answered them all.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Something, which is a lie. As Matt says on his website, it can be complicated.

It’s a feed, kind of like how twitter or facebook or mastodon is a feed. Except… this feed is owned by you. It’s a sliding scale for sure. But RSS is at the end.

Well, it’s more like a blog really.

You craft your feed by subscribing to other feeds (?). You can see them all in a feed-reader. But if that’s too weird for you, you can also just read them online. Most people style them so they look nice - just like normal websites. I don’t do that yet, I just generate some Hypertadi with a leftover script I had.

What is a memex?

This is way too big for me to answer right now. Matt gave me a whistle-stop-tour of some of the lectures he gives at a local university - about the history of the computer/internet.

A memex is an early idea for a computer. It was in the shape of a desk, because they were obsessed with furniture back then.

It had two screens because it was all about connecting information together. You’d put the same information in two places, so you’d need to see those two places at the same time. Hence the two screens.

Maybe there’s a paragraph of text that appears in two different places. This text is linked with another place through hyperspace.

Almost like hypertext???????

Or a hyperlink!!!!!!!!!

Crazy times.

Other people

Loads of other people answered my questions too. From their answers, I learned even more! I’ll save that for another wikiblog post.

Thank you to everyone out there for being so helpful.

What’s next?

The nice thing about getting your questions answered is that it gives you even more questions.

I’ll be posting more of them here on my feed, and on mastodon!


Back to the desk.