TLDR: I am adding a new link for RSS subscribers who just want to subscribe to technical posts. The RSS feed has always been available, but it is now explicitly one of the links across the top, for those who want their RSS feed to only give them my new technical posts.

I am writing this post primarily to let people know about this new link, but I also want to muse on it a little.

I realize that I have, in some ways, two blogs here in one website.

The Coded Message is primarily read for its technical content, especially for the posts about Rust. But I also write about other topics that interest me, and those posts are generally much less popular.

I combine them on the same website for a few reasons.

For one, it’s easier for me to have one blog. Blogging is a hobby for me, and so it has to play second fiddle to other life obligations, which is most of why I’ve been slow to finish some blog series and some promised future posts – I have not forgotten. This also means that anything that would make blogging harder for me, including separating out these blogs into two fully separate websites, is likely to make me blog substantially less. Laziness might not always be a virtue, whatever Larry Wall might say, but some amount of it is essential to actually accomplishing goals, especially in the hobby space.

But there is also a reason besides laziness, that is a little harder to articulate. As much as this blog largely concerns my professional work, it is my personal blog. All of the programming posts are laden with my personal opinions about programming, and this website is about everything I personally have to say publicly on any topic, not just programming. A separation between my professional and personal blogs would lead, in my own mind, to a sense of obligation to make the professional blog a polished resource for programmers, with more organization and possibly even a regular schedule, as opposed to merely being a forum where I hold forth on whatever topics interest me, which often but not always happens to be programming.

That said, I do make all my posts in the hopes that people read them, and find them useful in some way (even if that use is, as for my fiction posts, primarily entertainment). And I am aware that a large portion of my readership primarily, or even exclusively, finds my technical posts useful. As much as I may wish that all of my readers who are here for Rust content also care about my musings on other topics, I know that many of them do not, or even seriously disagree with me on these topics.

I try already to accommodate this. If you sign up for my newsletter, by default, you are only subscribed to technical posts, and you have to follow an additional link and explicitly subscribe if you want other topics. If you go to www.thecodedmessage.com in your web browser, you can click the link at the top labelled Computers/Programming Posts. And now, if you want to subscribe to just the technical posts via RSS, there is also a link at the top for that purpose.

I still encourage people who are interested in my other posts to read them, and I still plan on having this website combined for at least the medium-term future, but I wanted people to know that a technical-posts only RSS feed was available, if they so chose.

As always, I welcome feedback on my blog in the form of comments and e-mails (jah259 at cornell dot edu). Thank you so much for reading!