# New microblog with TILs

DevFeed: [New microblog with TILs](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/new-microblog-with-tils-21112.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/09/new-microblog/>)

Author: Julia Evans

Published: 2024-11-09T09:24:29Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Julia Evans](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/julia-evans.md>)

Topics: [RSS](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rss.md>), [Website](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/website.md>), [Bluesky](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bluesky-social.md>), [Mastodon](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mastodon.md>), [X (Twitter)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/twitter.md>), [SQLite](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sqlite.md>), [Go Language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/go-language.md>)

Tags: [blog-post](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog-post.md>), [go](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/go.md>), [rss](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rss.md>), [social-media](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/social-media.md>), [sqlite](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sqlite.md>)

## AI overview

The author describes creating a TIL section on their website for saving short notes about useful tools and facts that do not warrant full blog posts. The section uses custom styling, a Rake task for creating posts, and a separate RSS feed, serving as a searchable public alternative to bookmarks while allowing other social-media posts to remain ephemeral.

## Source excerpt

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL ("today I learned"). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is "hey, here's a cool thing", like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works and it's amazing, or cryptographic right answers, or this great diff tool. Usually I don't want to write a whole blog post about those things because I really don't have much more to say than "hey this is useful!" It started to bother me that I didn't have anywhere to put those things: for example recently I wanted to use diffdiff and I just could not remember what it was called. the solution: make a new section of this blog So I quickly made a new folder called /til/, added some custom styling (I wanted to style the posts to look a little bit like a tweet), made a little Rake task to help me create new posts quickly (rake new_til), and set up a separate RSS Feed for it. I think this new section of the blog might be more for myself than anything, now when I forget the link to Cryptographic Right Answers I can hopefully look it up on the TIL page. (you might think "julia, why not use bookmarks??" but I have been failing to use bookmarks for my whole life and I don't see that changing ever, putting things in public is for whatever reason much easier for me) So far it's been working, often I can actually just make a quick post in 2 minutes which was the goal. inspired by Simon Willison's TIL blog My page is inspired by Simon Willison's great TIL blog, though my TIL posts are a lot shorter. I don't necessarily want everything to be archived This came about because I spent a lot of time on Twitter, so I've been thinking about what I want to do about all of my tweets. I keep reading the advice to "POSSE" ("post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"), and while I find the idea appealing in principle, for me part of the appeal of social media is that it's a