RSS

The quickest way to get an update when I post new writing is to follow the RSS feed.1

I recommend receiving RSS alerts by email, through a tool like Distill.2 Or you can add it to an RSS Reader3 of your choice!

Website monitoring

An option - other than checking manually - that does not involve RSS is using a web monitoring app to check this website peiodically to see if updates have been made. I again recommend Distill, which has a web app and browser extensions, and can do its check using your computer rather than on the cloud.4 The app will email you whenever it detects changes. I recommend setting the time interval to at least a few days - don’t make a computer use a bunch of energy checking a website every hour just for my sake.

Bonus Option: watch the GitHub repo

If you want all the gritty details, you can always see the latest updates to the website on GitHub.

  1. RSS stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. We all owe much to the late Aaron Swartz, who helped develop RSS, along with Markdown (the syntax I use to write articles for this site), Creative Commons (the license under which this content is licensed), and Reddit. ↩︎

  2. You can also set up more complicated stuff like a Zapier integration if you like. ↩︎

  3. My favorite is Feedly, which has a great iOS app, but there are also plenty of free and open-source options. (Apparently Microsoft Outlook also has an RSS reading feature.) ↩︎

  4. One of the most popular apps for this is VisualPing, and it works well, but I prefer Distill’s apps. There are also self-hosted web monitoring solutions available, like Huginn. ↩︎