The Feed

How this board is set, and what it will not do

It is a snapshot, and it is not pretending otherwise. None of these sites sends a browser the header that would let this page read its feed, so the page cannot fetch them — and the two ways round that are a proxy we do not run and a third-party reader we would be handing you to without asking. So a person runs a tool, the tool reads every feed, and the board is set. Every plate below carries the minute its own wire was read, and the hall carries the minute the whole board was set. Both of those numbers are generated from the same file the rows come out of, so neither can quietly go wrong while looking authoritative.

A row is a name, a date and a destination. There are no summaries here, no excerpts and no first paragraphs. A departures board does not read you the contents of the train; it tells you where the train is going, and then you get on it. That is the metaphor and it is also the practical point — a room that pasted in everybody's opening lines would be republishing other people's writing onto one surface it does not own, which is the opposite of sending you to them. The tool that sets this board refuses a row carrying a summary field, because that edit is a friendly one and it will arrive: the rows look bare, somebody helpfully pastes the words back in, and the board has become a reader.

Nothing here is ranked and no site's activity is added up. You will not find out from this room which of our sites has been getting on with it, because that is not a fact anybody here needs and a board that showed it would turn publishing into a race between our own people — most of whom are Disabled, several of whom are one person with a chronic illness, and all of whom publish at the speed their bodies allow. The running order is stimpunks.org's own, off the page where our sites are already collected by somebody deciding, and re-sorting it here by who was newest would be this room overruling a decision made somewhere else.

Each wire names which feed it carries. Two of these sites publish more than one — a feed of the things themselves and a feed of the reasoning behind them — so “the latest from Star Stuff” is an ambiguous sentence, and a board that picked quietly between them would be answering a question you did not know it had been asked. Where there is a second feed, the plate says so and links it.

And this street is on its own board. A room that listed every sibling and left itself off would be claiming to be the station rather than a platform in it, so stimpunks.love's changelog is read over the network like every other wire — which means this board can be out of date about this site too, and is.

Go and read them properly

Every wire above links its site and its feed. Put the feed in whatever reader you use and the arrivals come to you, on your own time, with no board in between and nothing here deciding what you see first. That is the better version of this room and we would rather you used it.

stimpunks.org keeps a feeds page with the lot on it, including the socials, the repository commits and the bookmark archive, none of which is up here: a social post has no title, a commit is a different kind of thing from a published page, and a board that mixed all three would be a machine with three jobs.

Whose machine this is

The split-flap indicator board is Solari di Udine's machine — the flap boards that stood in railway stations and airports for decades, and the reason a certain clacking noise means something has changed to anybody over about thirty. This room is a picture of one drawn in CSS. It is not one of theirs, it is not affiliated with them, and it makes no noise at all.

The sites on the board are Stimpunks Foundation's, several of them built with Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms, who is named here rather than folded into our “we”. Penguin Pebbling is hers and Ryan Boren's together. Every title on this board belongs to whoever wrote the page it points at, and this room holds none of their words — only their names, their dates and their doors. The credits are collected in the liner notes.