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Another new side project: privacy.garden

privacy.garden screenshot

I’m not sure what it is with me and side projects at the moment, but I started another one today called privacy.garden. I’m a big fan of news aggregator websites, and thought it was about time there was one related to online privacy that I would visit regularly.

Unlike extinction.fyi, for which I manually update an XML file hosted via GitHub Pages, privacy.garden is an installation of WordPress hosted via a DigitalOcean droplet. I’m using the extraordinarily simple (and free!) WP RSS Aggregator plugin to import feeds from various privacy-related blogs.

The rather comically-bad combined emoji logo was created in about 30 seconds using this guide. I’ll replace it, hopefully with a custom-designed one from someone who knows what they’re doing. I may also tinker with the layout.

There is, of course, an RSS feed for the feeds that the aggregator pulls in which you can access at: https://privacy.garden/rss-feed

If you’ve got suggestions of blogs and other news sites to aggregate, please let me know!


This post is Day 98 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

A Hacker News for education?

I visit Hacker News every day. It’s a great resource of technie-related things – not just code stuff but things that people who work in that kind of area are likely to be interested in.

I’ve created something similar: http://ednews.meteor.com


Eight years ago, Will Richardson tried to create a ‘Digg-like site’. For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the medium to long-term. But his reasoning still stands:

[Th]is is all stemming from a bigger burr in my brain of late that has to do with the seeming randomness of all of the really great work that people in this community are starting to create. It’s just feeling like it’s all over the place, and that if we could in some way get our collective act together, we could start creating an incredibly valuable resource. I know it’s all about small pieces loosely joined, but wouldn’t it be great to point the newcomers to one spot that was a clearinghouse for all of this work? Not to mention the value it would have to us old timers in terms of bringing people in. I mean all of a sudden, it seems like everyone has a wiki, and most all of them have great intent and good content. But there’s also a lot of duplication of effort, and more importantly, dis-connection, at least that what it feels like to me.

Yes, these days we have Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social networks. But if the tech community find value in Hacker News (and they do!) why not one for education? I know there’s sites like Spigot but, while I find them useful, they’re not community-contributed links.

If there’s interest and it gains some traction, then I’ll work together with a few folks to deploy it to its own server/domain. 🙂

Try it! Add some links of your own: http://ednews.meteor.com

PS Let me know in the comments what you think (and if you have any problems with it!) I came up with the idea literally just now and did a quick search to see how I could deploy something today!

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