In the closed down market
Kicking up the papers
With his worn out shoes?
In his eyes, you see no pride
Hand held loosely at his side
Yesterday’s paper
Telling yesterday’s news
To state the obvious, these times have been different.
I have continued my obsession with reading all kinds of news, from all kinds of sources, reading literally thousands of headlines every day, and delving into items that intrigue me.
So many of those items relate to dismay about the new adminstration destroying our country (world?). Some report on effective resistance. A few offer suggestions for constructive paths forward.
The activist in me wants to get others to read the items that seem worth reading, but what is the best vehicle for doing that?
All of the social media and authoring platforms, Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Substack, … have their positives and negatives. I had been tending to primarily use Facebook, because of reach, but (a) wondered whether to depend on Facebook preserving the content and (b) wondered how visible/buried the content is.
One of my influences has been Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. Typically, just before midnight central U.S. time, I receive the email version of her Substack, dated that day. If I read it after midnight, it is yesterday’s news, but usually inciteful, thorough, and worth reading.
Yesterday’s News seems my answer, at least for now:
- kewus.net/yesterday is hosted on a server I control, backup, …
- kewus.net/yesterday is very simple WordPress — well-known technology — plus the Web monitoring tools I’ve crafted over last three decades will help
- I think I have a methodology for daily postings that will be easier for me, less intrusive on all the other things I do/want to do/hadn’t been getting done.
- I can (plan to) send the daily posts to Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Substack, …
For now, this site will likely be primarily a news aggregator, but I may start adding original content. I almost entirely avoid paying for subscription material, and try to use Internet Archive Wayback Machine, private browsing, etc. to glean the essence from paywalled content. It seems that many paywalled sites will let text only browsers such as lynx bypass the paywalls to see the text content.
In so far as seems appropriate, citations are included from sources I typically disagree with or worse: Wall Street Journal, Fox News, …
I don’t plan to let kewus.net/yesterday displace writing elsewhere on separate topics: technology, music, …