# rssfeed: add rss feeds to your blogs

an rss feed is a page that a simple blog such as this one can provide to report the latest posts on the blog in a structured format. then rss feed reader software can periodically fetch these and show the users the latest posts across many blogs. users can follow others without algorithmification and ads. pretty cool.

for an example of a feed go to my @/rss page and check out the source via the browser's source explorer.

for feed reader i recommend feedbro because it's a free, locally running browser extension and doesn't need registration to online services. there are many others, possibly better ones so do look around. (i haven't, explained in the next section.)

rss used to be a big thing while google reader existed. it became a bit obscure after that shut down but still many sites provide it and there are many feed readers.

in this post i want to compare rss to the alternatives and then give some implementation tips.

# addictive

disclaimer: i don't use any feed readers, i don't follow anyone with rss. in general i find most of these things too addictive. when google reader was a thing, i spent way too much time in it.

it's worse than something like a facebook or tiktok feed where you just get garbage content that you can easily quit after you spend 3 seconds thinking about it. your own feeds are personally curated, probably high quality and interesting so it makes it harder to quit.

but i did it nevertheless. now i rely on my memory to follow blogs and video channels. whenever i am in the mood for some fast-food equivalent of browsing, i just go through the blogs i remember, type their urls (i use no autocomplete) and check for new content manually like cavemen. if i forgot the exact url then i just websearch for it. if i forgot about a blog completely then good riddance, i just saved couple minutes for myself. then later if i rediscover the forgotten blog then it's always a nice present to read many new posts.

but nevertheless, rss is cool. i don't really like some of the quirks of it but at least we have a standard.

note that there's also atom, very similar, i don't fully understand the differences, but consider everything i say here apply to that too. atom seems to be using iso 8601 timestamps so it must be better. but iirc rss is more popular term that's why i talk about rss. i don't go into the technical details too much anyway.

# alternative: social network

one alternative to rss is to re-post the content on social networks and then the on-platform followers will get a notification about it if they are lucky. lot of people do this. if growing and reaching a large audience is the goal this is probably unavoidable.

it's a bit unreliable because as far as i am aware these megacorps take following and subscriptions more as a hint rather than an actual request. so a new post might be completely hidden for the followers.

and it isn't suitable for all followers: not everyone is comfortable letting megacorps know what they are following. not everyone has accounts on social media sites.

# alternative: web's push notifications

apparently javascript allows webpages to register for push notifications. then the website can remotely wake up a service worker in the user's browser to show a notification. this works even when the user doesn't have the page open! to reduce the creepiness of this, the service worker must show a popup so then the user notices that the website's code ran in the background and can disable that. (the service worker can skip showing a notification but if it does it too often, it will lose the notification permission and thus the permission to run without the page being open.)

this is pretty anonymous so it might be good for following sites. but it requires installing service workers so if the user changes browsers or clears site data then they might lose the subscription.

followers would get a notification on their phone or desktop immediately when the new content appears. i think this is very annoying so i'd guess not many people would sign up for this anyway.

to be fair, this is quite interesting technology, i might make a separate post about this later.

# alternative: email

the content creator can create a newsletter to which the users could subscribe via providing their email address. then the creator just sends out an email whenever a new content is published.

this can be convenient for the user because they can use their advanced email filters to categorize their subscriptions. if it's allowed then followers could even reply to the content and increase their engagement with the creator.

and it's also nice for the creator: they can see the number of their followers. and these are most likely real, interested followers since subscribing to a newsletter is a bit harder than subscribing to a channel on social media.

there are several problems though:

• no privacy. some people might not like giving out their email address. anonymous email forwarding services such as https://addy.io somewhat address this concern. (though not many people know about such solutions and people might not trust such services. minirant: this should be first-class feature in all email services so emails don't have to go through third parties.)
• the creator needs to set up email sending.
• the creator needs to deal with emails suddenly categorized as spam and thus the followers might not get the notifications.
• if registration is just "give me your email address" then this form can be used to spam others. requiring the user to send an email to register could solve this issue (see @/msgauth). but that raises the bar for registration and might lower the number of subscribers.

so i suppose email is somewhat okay but it's messy and still might not reach all people.

# alternative: rss

rss on the other hand is very simple to set up and can be served from a static website. just fill a couple fields in the xml such as publish date and title and it's done.

most rss feeds (mine included) also put the content into the feed but it's somewhat tricky. and each feed reader displays the feed slightly differently. if this is a concern, the feed could just contain a link to the main page. its main purpose is just to notify users of new content anyway. that's what i did for a while until i beefed up my feed generator.

some people put all content into the feed resulting in huge feeds. i recommend against this, just keep a couple months worth of content in the feed to keep it short (assuming it's updated regularly). otherwise the frequent fetches by the various readers can cause undue load. a small feed should be fine because i think most people only care for the freshest content anyway. for the "i-want-to-read-everything" usecase i recommend creating separate archive pages. my blog has that too, it's the github backup link at the top of the @/frontpage.

see http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get for some other tips to reduce the load. (not sure why that post doesn't consider reducing the size of the feed though.)

the downside of rss is that it requires specialized tools so it won't reach many people either. but it's the cleanest subscription mechanism for the followers because it doesn't leak much towards the site. of course an evil rss feed could do some shady tricks provide like personalized rss feeds or pixel tracking but the other alternatives can be worse.

# implementation

i don't go into generating the feed itself, there are other, better pages for that. just couple notes on what to do once the feed is ready.

add something like this to each page's html header:

  <link rel=alternate type=application/rss+xml title=domainname-or-other-title href=link-to-rss>

in my case i have this:

  <link rel=alternate type=application/rss+xml title=iio.ie href=rss>

this will allow rss feed extensions to automatically recognize rss feeds in the page and the user can add them via one click. usually this is why they have the "access your data for all websites" type of permissions. (not sure if that can be disabled in the extensions if that's a privacy concern.)

for the love of god, set the content disposition as inline for the rss feed. it's so aggravating when i click on someone's rss link and i get the browser's intrusive download prompt. what am i supposed to do with that? with inline disposition the browser will display the raw xml. but at least i can easily copy paste the rss link from the url bar. serve it from an "rss.txt" if your static file server determines the disposition based on the filename.

for bonus points add styling to that raw xml via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT. xslt is pretty cool. the server serves raw xml data and then xslt transforms that into a nice user interface without any javascripting. i do this on @/rss but my xslt skills are very basic so i just do the basic transformation of showing the title (@/rss.xsl).

# recommendation

if you have a blog, add an rss feed to it, because it's a relatively simple static content that only needs updating whenever new content is added. give people choice how they follow you.

btw, if you want to follow something (e.g. such as a youtube channel) as an rss feed and the main site doesn't seem to be providing them then look for rss feed generators. e.g. for youtube the invidious frontend (such as https://yewtu.be) does provide the feed in a convenient place: it's the link in the top right corner on a channel's video page. (yt provides it too, but it's somewhat hidden, see comments.) web search can find generators for other popular sites. there are even generic newsletter to rss converters such as https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. or there's https://newsblur.com/ which provides an rss like interface to popular sites.

rss is nice way to follow content you care about rather than what megacorps think you should see. (but keep in mind that it can be addictive.)

published on 2024-06-10, last modified on 2024-06-17

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