2026-07-18 21:59:24
What an amazing couple of days!
It was our 31st wedding anniversary on Wednesday (15th) so we went out for a nice meal.
My wife booked a night away on Thursday — we stayed in Pontefract — so didn't have to waste time travelling yesterday, my birthday.
We went to Pontefract Castle and did some exploring before checking in. Yesterday we headed for York and had a great time at the Minster. I love the architecture and history, and York Minster has a lot of both to explore.
We were having such a good time that it felt like we'd been away for ages, not just one night.
2026-07-16 00:31:07
I have now added an on-the-fly RSS feed for post comments. If there are any comments for a particular post, the link gets added to the live RSS feed using the <source:comments> attribute, e.g.
<source:comments>https://colinwalker.blog/blog/comments-feed.php?post=2426</source:comments>The post ID is passed to a new page which builds and returns the specific feed.
2026-07-14 20:38:38
Back in November 2023, Dave Winer wrote: "I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed."
If that sounds familiar, I mentioned it in the context of the MyStatusTool (MST) created by Andy Sylvester, of which I made a test PHP version.
Dave is now scratching that itch by building (and testing) rss.chat:
We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body.
Every user has an RSS feed, as does the whole community, and an OPML file lists everyone using it.
Obviously, any RSS reader can subscribe to any of the feeds but you would need to be using a client to post and reply.
On that topic, Dave has extended the source namespace with a couple of extra attributes:
source:inReplyTo acts in exactly the same way as mst:reply attribute I proposed in the MST namespace.
The parallels with blogging are obvious and I am looking at implementing both of these in my feed. This will, however, involve bringing back the live feed in addition to the daily.
I envisage external blogs being first class citizens in RSS networks in a similar way to how they are with micro.blog. I could also see the /blog & /reader integration becoming an rss.chat client.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes and exactly how far interop can be taken.
2026-07-13 17:40:40
Happy Monday!
It's been a while since I've said (or felt) that.
Following on from last week, it feels so freeing to decline and delete whole series of meetings this morning.
Friday saw me finally catch up with all messages and emails — the first time in the five weeks I've been back at work — so having nothing outstanding when I logged on today was so refreshing. Just being able to start the week with nothing hanging over me makes such a difference; not having that dread build up during the latter part of the weekend.
It's on me now to keep up to date and not let things build up. Only doing the one role will certainly help.
2026-07-11 00:10:59
Yesterday, I had what I thought was going to be a difficult conversation at work.
Since covid, my employer has gradually been increasing the required time in office for staff. This week they announced that everyone under a certain grade will have to start going in three days a week, everyone else (more senior staff) 4 days.
I fall into the first category so would need to go from my current two days a week to three. 1
I currently struggle with those two days — mental health reasons etc. — so the thought of three days fills me with a sense of dread.
An exception process exists where you can request more flexible working arrangements so I wanted to discuss following this.
Additionally, I have effectively been doing two jobs for much of this year: my main role, and a secondary role with another team.
Since my issues and subsequent time off earlier this year, I have been really struggling with context switching between those two things so wanted to step back from the secondary role.
I wasn't sure if either request would be received very well.
Fortunately, my manager is very understanding with regards to mental health issues and extremely supportive. She would rather I do what I can consistently rather than trying to force things and potentially go off sick again. She gets that a one-size-fits-all arrangement doesn't work.
The exception process exists for a reason.
My bigger worry was with regards to the secondary role. Last year, I had asked for opportunities to widen my remit — this role is what came of that. It is, however, very involved and a full time thing on its own. Since returning from my time off, I have found it increasingly difficult to manage both things, be pulled in different directions.
It's not so much as issue of temporal capacity, more mental capacity. I just don't have the headspace to deal with them both right now, and I would rather concentrate on my main role (even if it's a bit boring) than do a bad job of both.
Again, my manager agrees and doesn't want to overload me. She even broached the subject with the other manager on my behalf, which I wasn't expecting.
The previous time I was off sick, it was for five months. This time, I returned from a breakdown after only seven weeks. It felt like too long to be off again, but probably wasn't anywhere near enough. I felt guilty about being off and it likely accelerated both my return and that I didn't do so on a phased basis.
Maybe I'm regretting that a bit now.
Still, both of my managers have been brilliant which is such a wait off my mind. I can relax a bit.
I've been commended for coming forward on my own terms, even though it was incredibly hard to do, before things got out of hand and left things very sour.
Things have been left open so I can return when I feel I'm able, so no bridges have been burnt.
The reason is to improve in-person collaboration, but the person I mainly collaborate with is based in India. ↩