Owen's Blog Owen index.xml 19 Apr 26 12:58 +0200 Owen's Blog Hello, world! index.xml 18 Apr 26 21:44 +0200 index.xml/2026-04-17_hello-world blabber Hello, world!

]]> Welcome to RSS Club index.xml 18 Apr 26 21:44 +0200 index.xml/2026-04-18_welcome-to-rss-club blabber I suppose this was somewhat inevitable. In the end, I saw Terence Eden’s blog post (I cheated for reference sake - you can’t usually read it outside of an RSS reader) on RSS Club and just felt the self-inflicted pressure of blog/brand perfection, static site generators and opinionated JavaScript frameworks, melt away. It’s a no-brainer - going vanilla HTML isn’t much fun, and this way styling is still (relatively) in the eye of the beholder (Personally, I swear by Miniflux for minimal goodness).

The net result is this, as you read it. If you’re reading this, you’re either still using RSS or you’re a sucker for parsing XML with your eyes. I set this all up on my phone - the joys of parenthood - with a fair chunk of frustration, but also a lot of joy. I’m free to write some shit, and whoever chooses to read it needs to go a little further to do so. Seems good to me.

I’ll get into the stack/setup in another post. But this time not from my phone. Markdown is weird on a mobile keyboard.

]]> Blog Recommendations index.xml 19 Apr 26 12:57 +0200 index.xml/2026-04-19_blog-recommendations blabber I find RSS to be a pretty good way to discover other blogs and content I enjoy, in a non-algorithmic human-to-human way. Over a few years, I’ve amassed some things - usually high signal:noise ratio, and relatively low frequency of posts. If this is something you’re looking for, here are a few:

Title Feed URL Site URL Topic(s) Comment(s)
Aidan Steele’s blog (usually about AWS) https://awsteele.com/feed.xml https://awsteele.com/ AWS, cloud, software engineering I first knew about Aidan from Heimdall/Glass Echidna (IYKYK). Conveniently, he writes a bunch about AWS and I spend/spent a lot of time in that world.
Ariadne’s Space https://ariadne.space/feed.json https://ariadne.space/ Tech, systems software, IRC and such Couldn’t tell you where I first found Ariadne’s stuff, but given how prolific she is, I’m not surprised.

I’ll keep these updated as I go, so probably watch this space a bit.

]]> Stack index.xml 18 Apr 26 23:14 +0200 index.xml/2026-04-18_stack tech So what’s running this thing?

kk so it’s all just CloudFront and S3, but the magic is just mdrss and lefthook.

My lefthook.yaml looks like this, at time of writing:

pre-commit:
  parallel: true
  commands:
    mdrss-update:
      run: mdrss update && git add public/
      glob: "markdown/**/*.md"

pre-push:
  parallel: true
  commands:
    deploy-prod:
      only:
        - ref: main
      run: aws s3 sync public/ s3://oval.co.za-073653558623-af-south-1-an/ --region af-south-1 --delete
    invalidate-prod:
      only:
        - ref: main
      run: aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id E1CWQPMZT6JB9X --paths "/*"
    deploy-staging:
      skip:
        - ref: main
      run: aws s3 sync public/ s3://staging.oval.co.za-073653558623-af-south-1-an/ --region af-south-1 --delete
    invalidate-staging:
      skip:
        - ref: main
      run: aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id d14s5w4erp0kqk --paths "/*"

So it’s relatively simple and just gets out of the way. I use mise to make it easier to run particular versions of those tools, and the rest is pretty straightforward. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

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