This is an official ODERSA website. Here’s how you know

The official domain

The address of this site ends in odersa.org. Every service the association runs sits on a subdomain of odersa.org and nowhere else. If the address in your browser’s address bar does not end in odersa.org, this site is not ours.

Free, and no account

Everything is open straight away. No sign-up, no account, no password, no subscription, no advertising. Nothing is held back for those who pay, because there is nothing to pay for.

No data collected

This site does not follow you: no tracker, no tracking cookie, no measurement tool built into these pages, and nothing measured on your device. Our host counts requests in aggregate, as any server that answers does: a total, never a profile. You do not have to take our word for it: open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, and reload the page. You will see the full list of what the site asks for. Everything comes from odersa.org, nothing goes anywhere else.

Free to reuse

The content is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. You may copy it, translate it, print it and pass it on, for your classes as much as for the people around you, on one condition only: credit ODERSA.

Following the site with no account and no email

This site asks for no account and no email address, and can still let you know what it publishes. The answer is a feed, an old technique still intact.

What a feed is

A feed is a list that this site keeps up to date and publishes at a fixed address: the blog articles, with their title, their date and a summary. It is your software that comes to consult it when you ask it to; this site sends you nothing and learns nothing about who you are.

The address of this feed

The address to give a feed reader

/flux.xml

Opened straight in a browser rather than pasted into a feed reader, this address shows tagged text rather than a laid-out page: that is not a fault, it is the feed itself, written for software and not for an eye.

Why a feed rather than a newsletter

A feed and a newsletter make the same promise, telling you about what is new. A newsletter, though, means keeping addresses somewhere, and The AI Manual keeps nothing.

With a feed

  • No email address to hand over.
  • No list to keep.
  • No tracker hidden in a message.
  • Nothing to unsubscribe from: just remove the address from your reader.

With a newsletter

  • An email address to hand over.
  • A list of subscribers to keep up to date.
  • Often a tracker, to know whether the message was opened.
  • An unsubscribe link to keep working and to honour.

How to go about it

  1. Get hold of a feed reader, also called an RSS reader or an aggregator. There are many, free and paid; this page recommends none of them by name, as the rule of the house requires.
  2. Paste the address /flux.xml into it, wherever the reader expects a feed to be added.

That is all: the reader comes back to consult the list on its own, at its own pace. Some browsers and some email clients can do it without installing anything more, under a setting close to the word feed or RSS.

What the feed contains

The feed gathers the blog articles, from the most recent to the oldest: their title, their publication date, a summary and their address.

The course is not in it. It rarely changes, one chapter at a time, and can be browsed in full from the site map.

Following the site for software or a search engine

The feed is not the only address this site publishes for software rather than for an eye. Three others exist.

/sitemap.xml

The whole site map, in the format search engines read.

/data/impact.json

The site’s counters: pages, demonstrations, articles, sources.

/data/pages.json

The full body of content, page by page.

See also

The articles the feed announces are read in full on the blog. Every page on the site, grouped by theme, is gathered on the site map.