New features on the blog

Comments

You can now add comments to any blog post I've written, old or new. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and put your name and comment. Feel free to make up a name or leave it blank.

I'm not doing any moderation of the comments because I'm hoping it won't be necessary, so don't make me regret it 😅

I'm using Staticman for the comments. This lets me have comments without adding a database to my site. Setting it up wasn't as straightforward as I expected, so maybe I'll write a post about it later.

RSS feed

You can now subscribe to get every update to my blog by adding https://ajenkins.me/feed.xml to your RSS reader of choice. If you don't know what an RSS feed or reader is, it's a way to get updates from different websites aggregated in a single place. It's like subscribing to a website's newsletter, except the updates get pushed to a special app instead of your email inbox.

If you're looking for a recommendation for an RSS reader app, I use Feedly which has been working pretty well for me.

More features coming soon

Email updates

I wouldn't call it a newsletter, but for people who don't want to use an RSS reader, I'd like to offer the option to get an email every time I publish a new post.

Rather than use some fancy service like MailChimp, my plan is to just put a form on my home page where you can give me your email address, which would then be added to a list of email subscribers. And whenever I publish a new post, I would just use my personal email to inform everyone on the list.

I wanted to do it this way because MailChimp and its competitors brag about all of the insights you get into your newsletter's performance, but it just sounds like an invasion of privacy to me. See my post on why I don't have analytics on my site.

By the way, if this sounds like a terrible idea to you, please let me know... in the comments! 😉

Table of Contents

This might be a bit farther out because I don't think it's as important. But it would be nice on some of my longer posts to be able to jump to a particular heading.

...And more

I have a few other ideas, but that covers the major ones. Thanks for reading!