Splitting up my blog

Considering that I plan to write one post every day for the next 97 days, this will mean a lot of spam for my readers. Most of my personal friends will be bored by my technical posts and most of the people who reached to my blog from Google/Hacker News/Reddit and subscribed will probably be uninterested by my hikes (well, when I used to hike), lockdown musings and board game reviews. I guess this is tolerable if I write only one or two posts a month, but with 30 a month, it can get pretty annoying.

Because of this I am "splitting" up the blog into two sections: one with technical posts and one with personal (or rather non-technical) posts. There will be a separate RSS feed for both categories^[1]. And my MailChimp subscribers will have the option to select which posts they want to receive by email. Existing subscribers will have to click the "Update preferences" link at the bottom of any email to update... their preferences. If they don't do anything, they will still receive emails with all posts. New subscribers can choose when subscribing.

On the technical realization: going forward all technical posts will have a tech tag on them^[2]. I created two new routes in YAML, one pointing to tech/rss and one to personal/rss. I created two almost identical RSS templates, the only difference being that in one I retrieved only posts which have the tech tag and in the other one only posts that don't have it.

Initially I thought about having two marker tags, tech and personal, but that would mean that if I forget to put one of them on a post, that post would not show up anywhere. This way, by default a post shows up in the personal RSS feed, so it's still shown to people, even if maybe to the wrong audience.

In MailChimp I created a new interest group, which contains two segments, each subscribed to one of the two RSS feeds. The most time on this project was spent fiddling with the subscription forms to align the checkboxes for selecting what emails to receive.

That's it folks. If anyone notices any bugs in this, either in the RSS feeds or in the emails, please leave a comment.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload - Day 3.