A post from Shady Characters

A reminder: how to subscribe to Shady Characters

There have been a welter of informative and thought-provoking comments here lately (including some from Choz Cunningham, inventor of the snark, or “.~”), but all this activity is sometimes a little hard to follow. As such, I thought I’d post a reminder that it’s possible to subscribe directly to posts and to comments via dedicated RSS feeds.

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, well, the best way to describe it is to say that it’s a bit like email, only notifications are sent out by websites rather than by individuals, and it does not require you to sign over any personal data. It’s a great way to keep up with blogs and other websites. This article at The Verge can help you pick a suitable RSS reader program or service, many of which are free.

You can subscribe to any one or more of the following feeds:

Posts
This link (available at the bottom of the page under “RSS Feeds → All posts”) will notify you of new posts.
All comments
This link (available at the bottom of the page under “RSS Feeds → All comments”) will notify you of new comments made under any post.
Post comments
If you’re interested in the discussion related to a particular post, you can find the RSS for individual posts and pages by appending “feed/” to the end of that page’s URL. For instance, comments for this page are available at https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2015/06/how-to-subscribe/feed/.

Of course, you can still sign up for good old-fashioned email notifications of new posts, too. Please drop me a line if you have any questions or suggestions about how best I can keep readers up to date with new posts and comments here at Shady Characters.

Thanks to all commenters, old and new, and keep your comments coming!

6 comments on “A reminder: how to subscribe to Shady Characters

  1. Comment posted by Jon of Connecticut on

    Keith, I did finish your book over the weekend and put up a review on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26989311-gary-geiger?shelf=read

    It reads: “This is ostensibly about punctuation, but it is one of the best history books I’ve read. I learned more about Cicero from this book than anywhere else. I’ve learned a little bit about information technology and the Renaissance & Reformation. Houston even mentions Barry Bonds and Roger Maris and George W Bush in his chapter on the asterisk and doesn’t mangle baseball or the presidency too badly despite the handicap of being a Scotsman.”

    I forgot to mention that you also discussed the early history of the novel (among other topics.)

  2. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

    Hi Jon — thank you very much! I’m much obliged to you, and I’m glad you enjoyed the book. Also, it’s good to hear I didn’t make too many howlers in discussing these two most American of topics. You can thank Brendan Curry, my editor, for keeping on the straight and narrow!

  3. Comment posted by Jamsheed on

    Thanks for this. I have now subscribed to the comments thread! (I think? I use a web-based service–feedly, and those often seem a bit finickier than the native browser ones.)

    I do really wish there were a way that feeds could just pull and update comments as part of the post, but presumably that’s impossible given the way the underlying RSS technology works.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Jamsheed,

      I use Feedly too — it’s the best of the post-Google Reader services, I think, even if its Android app is a little sluggish.

      I see what you mean about retrieving comments along with the posts. Presumably the problem would be deciding when to emit a given post (along with its comments) in the feed — wait too long, to accumulate some comments, and the post is a little stale; emit it too soon, and you don’t get any comments at all. Is that what you mean?

      Thanks for the comment!

  4. Comment posted by Gunther on

    Since I don’t like Google etc. to observe my reading habits I use the RSS reader Fever. It’s self-hosted and works perfectly (at least for me).

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Gunther — thanks for the suggestion! I hadn’t thought of running a self-hosted service, but that would certainly be of interest to more tech-savvy readers.

Leave a comment

Required fields are marked *. Your email address will not be published. If you prefer to contact me privately, please see the Contact page.

Leave a blank line for a new paragraph. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>. Learn how your com­ment data is pro­cessed.