Is RSS dying? It has been reported to be on its last legs and about the pop its clogs for as long as I can remember. Yet it is still going and apparently strongly.

In case you are not familiar with this valuable service, I ought to say a few words about what it is. RSS users may skip this paragraph. What “RSS” actually stands for is disputed. The most popular translation of the acronym is “Real Simple Syndication” but there are at least three other commonly cited contenders. If you follow many websites, then keeping up with them all can be a chore. RSS seeks to make this easy. Many sites that reguarly update their offering provide their RSS feeds. These can be entered into you RSS reader which will then present you any new articles as these appear on the sites you follow. Different RSS readers provide different facilities such as filters to screen out unwanted topics. For more information on RSS and a description of some readers or aggregators, as they are also called, this FreeRange page may be useful.

My first uses of RSS were made through my computer. In those days, only a few decades away in calendar time but aeons away in terms of technical development, if you had a mobile phone you could use it to make and receive calls, send and receive texts (limited to 160 characters), and that was it. Internet-capable mobiles, let alone “smartphones”, were still naught but a gleam in some developer’s eye. Choosing an RSS reader was therefore fairly simple. You could opt for an application or program (the term “app” had yet to be coined) to run on your desktop or for a site on the Web.

In those days, there were many readers to choose from, each offering a core of common features but also struggling to provide bells and whistles that distinguished it from the others. Arguably, the most popular was the Google Reader that you accessed online. You created an account and then entered the URLs of the feeds that you wished to follow. Google discontinued their reader in July 2013, to much protest and dismay. Had they not, I am sure many would still be using it.

Roll the calendar forward a few years and the Internet-capable mobile phone makes its appearance. Compared with today’s smartphones, mobiles’ access to the Internet and Web was at first pretty primitive and provided no serious competition for browsers and email clients on computers. That soon changed, of course. My first mobile with a Web browser was a Nokia 9300 Communicator. The browser provided the width of a Web page but only a few lines in length. My next Internet mobile was a Blackberry. The email service was extremely good with push on all the accounts you signed up for. The Web browser, though, was pretty poor compared with what was beginning to be available from other manufacturers.

Tigger had acquired an Apple iPod and when she upgraded to a newer model, I inherited the old one. I was enchanted by the quality of the display (by now the iPod could handle email and access the Web) and we very soon migrated from Blackberry to iPhones, a decision from which we have never looked back.

It now became interesting to consider using an RSS app on the iPhone. Which one, though? If you follow even a small number of feeds, setting them all up on a new reader is rather a chore. It made sense, therefore, to choose a reader that ran synchronously on both the PC and the iPhone. Whatever changes you made to the one would also be reflected on the other.

Finding a reader that worked on both was not that difficult. The problem lay in finding one that performed on both in ways that I liked. For example, Google Reader would mark an article “read” only if you told it to do so while many others did so as soon as you opened the article. Given that read articles disappeared from the display, this meant that you could easily lose one by mistake. At the very least, a reader should make it easy to mark an opened article “unread”, thus saving it for further study later.

For a long time, I used Inoreader. This has Web access and an app for the iPhone. I would say it’s pretty good and that it will suit most people. There is, though, one slight problem with it: it is a “freemium” application, that is, it has free and paid-for versions. The free version is perfectly adequate for my purposes but Inoreader did tend to nag me to upgrade. While I understand the makers’ desire to acquire income, this annoyed me. So I looked around for other choices.

I eventually plumped for one that I had tried before but had dismissed for reasons that were valid at the time but which I no longer remember clearly. This time around, I was quite impressed with it. It has Web access and an iPhone app. It too is freemium but it has not once nagged me so far. Adding feeds is very easy. Gone are the days when you had to find out the URL of the site’s RSS feed and enter that. Nowadays, you simply supply the site URL and the reader finds the feed and sets it up. This reader seems to catch new posts more quickly than Inoreader does. (I ran them side by side for a while to test this.) The reader I am talking about is Feedly.

Changing RSS readers used to be a chore. You would have to enter all your feeds into the new reader. If you have a large number of feeds, collected over a long period, this could seem prohibitive. Happily, there exists a facility called OPML. This is an acronym for Outline Processor Markup Language but the user doesn’t need to know anything about that. You simply tell your current RSS reader to export its OPML file and then you import this into your new reader. It usually works pretty well and means that you can set up your new reader ready to go in just a few minutes (or even seconds). You don’t need to know anything about the technicalities.

So, in answer to the question posed at the beginning, no, I don’t think RSS is dying. I think it is still a very valuable service and will therefore go on being available until something better comes along. There are of course rivals. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, your site includes Reader, a page on which you can link to other blogs you wish to follow – very much like an RSS reader, in fact. Or there are services like Bloglovin. You may have your own favourite way of keeping tabs on blogs and other sites which may or may not involve RSS. For me, RSS fills the bill and I am sticking with it, at least for now.

You may have noticed that several of my posts mention our favourite breakfast of coffee and croissants. The croissant, as we know it today, originates in France but has made a place for itself in many other countries. The most common form is the so called butter croissant (croissant au beurre), though there are other variants, including almond and chocolate croissants. The common or classic croissant is made of flaky pastry (you will find plenty of recipes online), a triangle of which is rolled, leaving the triangle’s apex in the centre on the outside to form a shape that is thicker in the middle with tapering ends. The croissant is then bent to give it the crescent shape from which it takes its name.

Croissants are best eaten while still warm from the oven and accompanied by a cup of good coffee. We have eaten croissants in the UK, in France and in Belgium. The Belgian variety is distinguished by a fine sugar glaze that I have not seen applied elsewhere.

I became curious to know the origin of this delicious pastry: who invented it, when and why did they choose its characteristic shape?

When you research a topic like this online, caution is necessary, especially where something as popular as the croissant is concerned. Why? Well, because legends and urban myths, when not deliberate fabrications, abound and make it difficult to find the truth. One needs to set aside the facile explanations and seek out sources with some claim to serious scholarship.

When you start to search for the history of the croissant, you will quickly come across the story of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 when the city was besieged by the Turks. This popular anecdote claims that the Turks, in order to break into the city, began to mine under the walls at night. They might have succeeded but for the fact that the city’s bakers, who work in the silent hours of the night, heard the sounds of digging and alerted the authorities. The Turkish plot was foiled and the city saved. To celebrate this event, so the story goes, the bakers invented a special cake, giving it the shape of the Muslim crescent on the Turkish flag. This confection was given the name kipferl, “crescent” or, as modern dictionaries tend to translate it, “croissant”.

We now turn the clock forward to the last third of the 18th century when the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette came to France from her native Vienna to marry the equally misfortunate King Louis XVI. In her honour, and because she missed her Austrian home cooking, the palace chefs made croissants to cheer her up. The croissant had finally made it to the big time and has remained famous ever since. Or at least, so runs the legend.

As far as I can tell, this story of the croissant, and its various elaborations, derive from a single source. A man called Alfred Gottschalk wrote about the croissant in the first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique in 1938. There he tells the story of how the kipferl emerged in 1686 from the siege of… Budapest! Yes, Budapest, not Vienna. The story is the same with burrowing Turks and bakers working the night shift and the celebratory invention of the crescent-shaped pastry. It was later, in a different work on food, his Histoire de l’Alimentation et de la Gastronomie (1948), that Gottschalk changed the scene of the siege and the invention of the croissant to Vienna in 1683.

So was it Budapest or Vienna? It probably doesn’t matter, because it seems that neither city was the birthplace of the croissant. You can dismiss his story and all its modern variants as Scotch mist.

The crescent-shaped pastry has been found to have already existed no later than the 5th century. Called in Latin panis lunatus (“moon- or crescent-shaped bread”), it had a role to play in religion and was probably eaten in convents during Lent. Later, in a document of 1549, referring to a banquet given by the Bishop of Paris for the Queen of France, mention is made of “quarante gasteaux en croissans” (“forty cakes in crescents”).

What were these early croissants made of and what were they like to eat? The mists of time (Scotch or otherwise) make it difficult to know. The crescent-shaped cake or pastry certainly continued to exist but little is said of how it was made, except for a reference in a later edition of the Larousse Gastronomique to beaten eggs, which certainly do not figure in the modern version.

The first definite description of the croissant as we know it appears in the Nouvelle Encyclopédie Culinaire by Auguste Colombié in 1906. Here at last, we find the recipe known and enjoyed by all lovers of croissants. Whether it has much in common with the croissants of the past, apart from its shape, is difficult to say but it seems unlikely. We can be sure, however, that the croissant is not Viennese or Hungarian, that no Turks were harmed in its making, and that it is inescapably and essentially français. And delicious, to boot.

The day started with a jab, a flu jab, to be precise. Yes, it’s flu season once more and my GP surgery has issued its annual invitation to be immunised against this scourge. There is always a certain amount of guesswork in predicting which strains of the virus will be active in any year and we can only hope that they their decision was the right one.

We followed up with breakfast at a nearby branch of Caffè Nero.

This branch of Nero is in Exmouth Market, a street of shops that also hosts a street market on certain days of the week. Either we were too early for the market or it doesn’t operate on Saturdays.

We took a bus to Ludgate Hill where I photographed this view with three spires. The two flanking spires belong to St Paul’s and the middle one to St Martin, Ludgate.

(The name Ludgate is thought by some to derive from that of a legendary King Ludd who supposedly ruled this area. I remain sceptical.)

From here we descended onto a platform of the City Thameslink Station and caught the Brighton train that you can just see entering the station.

We were not going to Brighton, however, but disembarked at East Croydon. For once, we left the station by the side entrance because Tigger wanted to see whether there was any interesting street art here in the backstreets.

The one piece that claimed my attention was this building-sized figure. It vaguely resembles the once famous Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

We popped into Fairfield Halls briefly to see what it looked like after its recent refurbishment. It was rather reminiscent of the South Bank Centre.

We found this large-scale painting by Dan Kitchener. The perspective and resolution of the photo are bad but it was high up on a wall!

This fine old post office caught my eye. I don’t know quite how old it is (early 20th century perhaps?) because I couldn’t see a date anywhere.

We passed by the market which was in full swing and very crowded.

Next, we took to the tram. (Did I mention that we like trams?!)

It took us fir a spin through the landscape till we decided to alight in Morden.

Here, we are looking along the tram track in the direction from which we had come.

We entered Morden Hall Park and walked through it.

It has a steam – more a river, really – called the Wandle.

The park possesses the remains of a snuff mill. The mill has gone and the wheel no longer turns but it’s rather decorative.

Adjacent to the mill is the London Acorn School which occupies this picturesque crenelated building.

We visited this site which is called The Stable Yard (because that is what it used to be and still resembles) where we had a lunch of soup and bread.

We took a look at an exhibition of art by the Wilderness Art Collective which seeks to draw attention to the threat to our wildernesses.

I photographed this crowd of ducks before we left the park to continue our journey.

The long bus ride brought us to Brixton. We came to the first floor of the Bon Marché department store where there is a branch of Caffè Nero. There Tigger took the above panorama and I wrote the words that you have just been reading.

Off again to find our next bus. I took this photo of the O2 Academy Brixton in passing.

The bus took us through many districts including Streatham and Lambeth.

Eventually, it dropped us here. Recognize it? Yes! Victoria Station. The station has a shopping mall (pardon Americanism) where Tigger wanted to make a purchase for a colleague’s birthday.

That done, we caught our final bus, the 38, that runs from Victoria to Clapton Pond (Where? Never mind…), passing through the Angel Islington.

There we finished up, as we so often do (and you must be used to it by now!) in Jusaka.

And finally, for all you arachnophiliacs (that’s spider fans in old money), here is a photo taken by Tigger earlier this afternoon;

Pretty, isn’t she?

As my previous post was rather long, here is a nice short one to compensate 🙂

As mentioned in last Friday’s post, we usually treat ourselves to dinner out on Friday evenings.

The Banana Tree

This is where we went today, a restaurant at the Angel called The Banana Tree. I think the bill of fare is mainly Thai though they seem rather vague about this. Anyway, I had Pad Thai with tofu, if that’s any indication.

The food was quite good though I found it prudent to remove the slices of raw red chilli placed on top of my serving. I have been caught out by chilli before and preferred not to take any risks!

As you know, if you have read my introductory post or the page About the blog in the side bar, I compose and publish my blog posts mainly on my iPhone. This has the advantage of immediacy but to do so I need an editor that is comfortable to use and is completely reliable. By “reliable”, I mean that it always works as I expect it to and doesn’t lose my work if I close it down or switch it out to do something else. Another requirement is that it must provide a reasonably easy way for me to send or transfer the finished post to WordPress. I have left till last one essential requirement: the editor must be able to accept images and then transfer these with the text to WordPress when I am ready to publish.

A surprisingly large number of editors, notes apps and word processors fall at the very first fence: they do accept images. I find it unbelievable that anyone would create an editor or notes app for the iPhone that cannot insert images. The iPhone, after all, was designed around its ability to display graphics. Any editor that cannot fo that should be relegated to the Stone Age.

The hours I have spent seeking and trying editors, if joined together as a single time span, would probably amount to several days. I will admit that it has become something of an obsession.

In my post A better blog editor, I concuded that the best app I could find for the job was one that was already on board, Notes. I still think it has a lot going for it though it is not perfect. Its virtues:

1. It saves as I work and therefore never loses an edit, even when I swap it out to do something else or even close down the iPhone;

2. It accepts images and treats them sensibly, i.e. sizes them to fit the display;

3. It allows me to put texts in italics and bold and transfers these styles to WordPress;

4. It allows me to post the article to WordPress, using copy and paste;

5. I can then save the edit to iCloud Drive and later transfer it to my PC for safe-keeping.

It has one fault, though this is annoying rather than serious. Once my draft reaches a certain length, every time I swap Notes out and then return to it, it has placed the pointer at the top of the text, so that I have to scroll all the way down before continuing the edit.

A minor problem is that it has no facilities for editing the image, by which I mean setting the alignment and perhaps caption. I therefore have to go through the post in the WordPress editor to deal with each image in turn.

In the above mentioned post, I reported that I had tried the editor in the WordPress app and that it had lost my edit. When I had calmed down, I realized that there was a way to avoid that but by then I had given up on that editor. Today, I decided to give it another try.

To avoid loss, I wrote a few words of my test post and then saved it as a draft. The app does not save automatically, as far as I can see, and so it is necessary to explicitly save the text before leaving the editor. You do this by clicking on Update.

Before continuing, I should make one thing clear. WordPress has not one but two editors. There is the Classic Editor that we have been happily using for years and the spanking new, all bells and whistles editor, known both as the Block Editor and as the Gutenberg Editor. Many people do not like the Block Editor. I am one of them. It is unnecessarily complicated for my purposes. I am sticking with the Classic Editor until they stop supporting it in, I think, 2022. In what follows, therefore, “the editor” is taken to be the Classic Editor.

Actually writing the text in the WordPress editor is much like writing it in Notes. There are buttons for italics, bold, underline and strike-through. You press the button to switch the style on and press it again to switch it off. All very simple and straight forward.

There is a plus sign in a circle which you press in order to insert an image into the text. Pressing it opens a menu allowing you to choose from several sources including the obvious ones of camera and image library. Once chosen the image appears in the text properly sized.

One advantage of working in the WordPress editor is that as soon as you have inserted the image, you can immediately edit it, e.g. centre it, set the alt definition and, if you wish, a caption.

It was when looking at image editing that I made a serendiptious discovery. There is a certain button in the functions bar above the keyboard to which I had hitherto given no attention. It is out of sight on the right hand side and you have to swipe the bar left to reach it. It looks like this: </>

I pressed it and – guess what? – yes, it switched me to the HTMLeditor! If I put an exclamation mark at the end of the last sentence, it is not because there is anything particularly surprising about this. Rather it is a reflection of my joy on finding it. There is another way to access the HTML editor from the menu but being able to click a button means you can easily switch it on just to do one thing and then switch it off again.

Why did this make me joyful? Well, because it means that I can enfold an image in HTML code of my own confection in order to set how it appears. Here is an example:

Coffee at Jusaka
(Photo by Tigger)

I have mentioned before that if you use WordPress’s caption function it produces and ugly result. For an example, look at the pictures in my post A little more about wasps. Having quick and easy access to HTML means I can add enough code to centre the image and centre a caption underneath it. No dull grey frame and no off-centre caption.

So am I going to write all my posts from now on in the WordPress editor? To be honest, I don’t know. I think I will give it a try now that I know it will not lose my work as long as I remember to save before quitting or swapping out. One disadvantage is that there is no backup copy left after posting. So far I have not needed the backup but who knows what the future may hold?