Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog?
I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?
So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!
P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
So while I can't speak to how much the RSS/Atom feed on my blog is used, I make use of the feeds on several other site/blogs, which I read in NetNewsWire. I've been doing this since the mid-2000s or so, with a short stint of a few years that I didn't in the mid-2010s.
The standardization of the content is one reason I do this, but the other is that I'd simply forget to check some of these sites/blogs if I didn't, particularly those that only post occasionally.
So from my perspective, maintaining a feed is worth it.
EDIT: Answering your other question, I use the static site generator Zola for my blog, but I get what you're saying about wanting to avoid rabbitholes. I don't have any tricks for generating a feed.
Seconding this. I find rss to be a great way to sync my media/entertainment sites across devices.
Mostly YouTube/nebula by quantity but also almost all of the webcomics I read and plenty of blogs and news sites.
And honestly I need to spend more time using it more
I suppose that makes sense. I wonder if at some point - assuming an audience that is sufficiently leveraging a feed - it makes more sense to somehow concentrate more on the feed aspect and care less about some static html file...Maybe the feed file gets consumed automatically far more often, while the destination html file is probably never or close-to-never actually visited directly (because how the heck would anyone find it otherwise)? Hmmm....interesting.
Some questions: How much do you care whether you have readers? Do you want to get feedback when you write something new? If so, how will your readers find out? There are lots of ways to get notifications these days.
The most old-school way is email. If that's your thing, the no-hassle way would be to post on Substack or some other website that makes email a priority. I've heard that for professional writers who earn money from subscriptions, email is pretty important.
As a reader, I personally don't want to get email and would prefer RSS, but most websites that do email also do RSS.
To me, though, Substack feels a bit too formal. I used it for a while and then stopped, because I don't think the effort to write polished essays is worth it. Every subscriber is a stranger and I'm not sure I want to annoy people with email when I write something less formal. (Even though they signed up, what did they sign up for, exactly? More stuff about AI, which is what I was into at the time?)
An alternative would be to post a link to social networking sites whenever you have a new article. Some people can be reached that way, but it's pretty fragmented these days, so you might have to post in multiple places.
For those that don't, see Kill the newsletter which converts newsletters to RSS feeds
I provide RSS feeds on my blog, but judging by substack etc. there are a lot of users who use the email feeds so I'd almost want a service that does the reverse. Provide it my RSS feeds and people can sign up for it as an email newsletter if they want.
There’s a company that does that.
I do care about having readers, but its not going to be my dayjob or anything that i need/want to scale either. As far as feedback, this is a good question...Because id am not a fan of having inline comments to each post, and totally expect to engage with comments on the fediverse, er, social media.
You know, that has been gaining a bit of steam...and i half wondered....But, nah. For my writing I'd almost feel like I'd be intruding. But, definitely a great idea!
Yeah, that is what i used to do years ago - even when i did have an rss/atom feed. So, I assume I'd do something similar....although, nowadays i'm so rarely on the coventional social media, and lots more on the fediverse (if anyone might consider these 2 as different).
Thanks for your suggestions by the way!
I think that, whatever you do, make it clear to website readers what choices they have for how to subscribe, and hopefully it will work out. If you like Mastodon, maybe that’s a link to the account where you publish a link to each post? Not everyone knows how to subscribe to a Fediverse account, but maybe it’s enough of an audience.
Yeah, waaaay back in the day, I'd use the orange RSS icon as a link for feed subscription...and then also would reference my old school social media accounts, etc. Would use a similar approach, but swap out my fedi account for the legacy social silos. ;-)
If you want people to be able to follow your blog, having a feed isn't just worth it, it's necessary. You could futz around with social media profiles or a newsletter if you want, but a feed should come first.
The rabbit hole is real, and not wanting to waste time is perfectly valid, but I do think there's time-saving value in using something like a static site generator. I also think there's a perspective to your situation you haven't considered.
My favorite advice for anyone who wants to publish content on the web — that I learned from the web serial author Wildbow — is to have a few weeks or months of content ready to be published, before your first post. Of course, you're writing for a blog, not a web serial, so consistent posting might not be as important to you. Nevertheless:
You already have a substantial backlog of content, practically ready to be posted. I'm sure there's some editing and whatnot you'd like to do, but the hardest part is done. The trove of content is there, ready to go. You now only need to figure out the technical details of how to post and organize it.
You've already bought yourself time to waste on this.
You can afford to indulge in picking out a static site generator, figuring out how a RSS or Atom feed is generated, writing or finding a theme for your blog, and anything else, if you want to. It is still a rabbit hole, but you've brought a parachute and a grappling hook.
Soupalt works on existing webpages. It's basically built for this exact sort of modular or minimal use.
If you'd rather use something more popular, I have read of people doing exactly what you want with Hugo and Jekyll.
Yeah, looking like taking the plunge on a static site generator might be the way. I appreciate the feedback and helpful links!
If you don't even want to go that far, a friend wrote a tool that just manages feeds and nothing else.
I don't use it myself (I looked into it then decided to bodge feeds onto my own weird custom SSG) but it may fit your needs.
Oh wow, this is almost exactly what i might have wanted to use if i wouldn't go the SSG route! However, reviewing all the feedback I'm convinced to offer an RSS/Atom feed, so I think I'm going to head down the SSG route - which should include feed generation. But, thanks alot for sharing this; the project seems really cool!!!
In my experience, a static site generator is very worthwhile. I use Jekyll because my minimal site is entirely freely hosted via GitHub pages.
Including a feed is important IMO because it's a simple standard that helps people follow you without a corporate middleman or an algorithm. The world is so dominated by proprietary social media today that it's nice to be able to fight back in any small way. I really wish more local businesses and friends had RSS feeds, because the Facebook/Instagram/Threads/Xitter/Bluesky/etc feeds are absolute dumpster fires that constantly hide useful updates from me and force ads and suggested content down my throat.
Have you taken a look at bear blog? If you really don't want any fuss, that could be a good way to go.
Yep, good points! Beyond the silos, it would feel good to have my own feed under my own control. :-)
Yes, i am aware of Bear Blog, and admire their approach...but since [Bear Blog can not be self-hosted] (https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog?tab=readme-ov-file#can-bear-blog-be-self-hosted), its a hard "no"/stop for me. I kinda need to have my posts live under my domain name and associated hosting space. But, i'm sure Bear blog and other platforms like it, would make perfect sense for others. :-) Thanks for the suggestions and your feedback!
Multiple people have told me they follow my blog via RSS, so, yes
I'll answer the title:
Yes!
I would otherwise forget to read anyone's new posts. RSS feed are essential for me because I read so many blogs.
Fair enough, and thanks for the confirmation! :-)
I've been setting up sites lately with Astro and Cloudflare pages. I know there is an RSS plugin in Astro, though I haven't messed with it much. Astro can serve regular HTML pages, markdown (transformed by templates), as well as pages generated from the Astro framework. It has the capability to be completely static, or a mix of static and dynamic.
The integration with Cloudflare pages is pretty great. I can push to a branch, see and test the preview, then PR to main to put it into production. If you push straight to main, it will pick your changes up and rebuild in less than a minute. If you don't want to use a framework like Astro, you can just tell Cloudflare where the web folder in the repo is and put in nop commands for the build. Their free offering is very generous, 500 build a month, plus 1000s of worker invocations (I forget hoe many exactly) if you do have dynamic content you want to serve.
If you end up wanting to go this way, I could take one of my site repos and strip the content out and send you a functional starting point. Just DM me.