Education Events in Philadelphia

An interactive workshop led by William T. Hazard where participants will learn how to make their own RSS-compatible blogs. Many poets, writers, and artists consider an online presence to be beneficial as a way to engage with their audience, connect with fellow-travelers, practice their craft, and share their work. In the last few years, many writers have turned to the blogging platform Substack in order to create and share their online presence, but Substack, as The Atlantic and many others have noted, has a White Supremacist problem – they've platformed many Nazis, allowed their hate speech to proliferate amongst an ever-growing audience, and even allowed them to monetize their work. As a result, Substack has become a safe haven for White Supremacists who have been kicked off of or demonetized on other platforms. Most of the writers who use this and other platforms created by other fascist-sympathizing companies like Meta and X would rather not engage with these companies or create value for them by sharing work on their platforms, but they don't see another way to be online. There is another way. While much of the internet today has been enclosed within corporate platforms, not all of it has. The internet was built on open protocols that nobody owns, not on privately owned platforms, and those protocols are still freely available, there to be used. In this workshop, we'll take a look at how to use them to create a blog that is available to a wide audience and convenient to access but isn't beholden to fascists. We'll focus on the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) protocol, and by the end, you'll have the tools you need to create an RSS-compatible blog with HTML, CSS, XML, markdown, and shell scripting. While all these acronyms and coding language names might sound scary to some, please don't worry – this workshop will be geared toward beginners, much of the code will be provided for you, and as long as you've got a macOS, Windows, or Linux computer, you should be able to get up and running just fine, even if you have no prior experience with coding.