After nearly 3 years and more than 3200 posts I’m going to slow down the posting frequency on Read Rust. I hope this will free up some spare time and make it easier to take breaks from social media. I aim to share all of the #rust2021 posts I can find, but after that I’ll probably only share posts that seem particularly noteworthy or interesting.
I started Read Rust in January 2018 to track the posts being shared as part of the inaugural call for blog posts. When I started there were only a handful of new posts each day to triage. Now there are many more and unless I triage and publish daily they quickly pile up.
Also, I’ve kind of built a reflex of trying to “complete the Internet” each day by ensuring that I read my whole Twitter feed, and new posts on /r/rust. I would like to break this habit and be able to take breaks from these things, without feeling like I might miss an important post.
Whilst I think there is value in the curation and archiving of posts on Read Rust, the website doesn’t see a lot of use. I think most of the value for people is following the Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook accounts. However, there’s a fair amount of overlap between posts shared on /r/rust, @rustlang, and This Week in Rust. So, I think that if folks keep an eye on one or more of those they will still see most posts of note.
If you’re not into social media, the full list of more than 450 Rust RSS feeds I subscribe to is available via an OPML file on the site. So, feel free to use that to subscribe to a bunch of feeds instead. Rust blogs OPML.
It’s been fun to build, and rebuild the website and surrounding tooling over the years. Read Rust was initially just an RSS feed but after requests for an actual web-page I built a small site with the Cobalt static site compiler. In late 2019 in an effort to streamline the sharing of posts I rebuilt the site as dynamic web app. In early 2020 I added full text search.
As mentioned in the introduction, from here I plan to share #rust2021 posts and after that posting will be much less frequent. Thanks for reading, and happy coding 🦀.
Frequently Anticipated Questions
Q. What about getting others to help share posts?
I considered this, and it it was actually part of the motivation for the rebuild in 2019. However, ultimately Rust is now large enough and continuing to grow such that it’s become less and less feasible to curate the entire firehose of Rust content.
Q. What about making it a sort of RSS powered Rust planet?
I think there’s value in curation. Rust is popular enough now that there’s a lot of low effort posts, or repetitious getting started posts. Also, people rightly have diverse interests and their blog may not solely contain Rust posts. So, I’d prefer to keep the archive in the focussed state it’s in now.
Q. What will happen to the site and social media accounts now?
I plan to keep the site up and running indefinitely. I am a strong believer in not breaking links on the web, and I think I have a pretty decent track record. For example, this site has been online for 13 years and I still have redirects in place from the very first version of it. I may still share the occasional post but in general I hope to free up a bit of time to work on other things.