| ▲ | susam 7 hours ago |
| Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1] From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are: 1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools. 2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers. 3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly. [1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html |
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| ▲ | ronbenton 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise. I guess this makes sense—hard to monetize views through an RSS reader |
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| ▲ | threetonesun 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's funny back in the Google Reader days monetizing via RSS was quite common. You'd publish the truncated version to RSS and force someone to visit the site for the whole version, usually just in exchange for ad views. Honestly while it wasn't the greatest use of RSS it was better than most paid blogs today being ad-wall pop-up pay-gate nightmares of UX. |
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| ▲ | neilv 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Now that browser developers did their best to kill RSS/Atom... Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the `link` element? Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom visually in the page, too? (On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message about the MIME content type.) |
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| ▲ | data_base 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I use RSS Style[1] to make the RSS and Atom feeds for my blog human readable. It styles the xml feeds and inserts a message at the top about the feed being meant for news readers, not people. Thus technically making it "safe" for less tech savvy people. [1]: https://www.rss.style/ | | | |
| ▲ | crabmusket an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Shout out to Vivaldi, which renders RSS feeds with a nice default "card per post" style. Not to mention that it also has a feed reader built in as well. | |
| ▲ | rednafi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I removed all the bullshit social media icons and made sure that the rss icon is the first thing you notice on the landing page[1]. [1]: https://rednafi.com | | |
| ▲ | neilv 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For a personal site, I'd probably just do that. (My friends are generally savvy and principled enough not to do most social media, so no need for me to endorse it by syndicating there.) But for a commercial marketing site that must be on the awful social media, I'm wondering about quietly supporting RSS/Atom without compromising the experience for the masses. | | |
| ▲ | rednafi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair. For commercial sites and pretty much anything you want more eyeballs on, you need to put them on the social media. |
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| ▲ | ModernMech 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | With the lack of styling, I'm sorry to say I didn't notice the RSS icon at first at all. Adding the typical orange background to the icon would fix that. | | |
| ▲ | rednafi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair criticism. I'm trying to find a way to present that without being obnoxious. |
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| ▲ | frogulis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is there any reason today to use RSS over Atom? Atom sounds like it has all the advantages, except maybe compatibility with some old or stubborn clients? |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Based on my own personal usage, it makes total sense that RSS feeds still get a surprising number of hits. I have a small collection of blogs that I follow and it's much easier to have them all loaded up in my RSS reader of choice than it is to regularly stop by each blog in my browser, especially for blogs that seldomly post (and are easy to forget about). Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them have style normalization for example and native reader apps support offline reading. If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps for other types of web content… |
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| ▲ | ungreased0675 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you have a recommended iOS RSS feed reader? | | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | NetNewsWire is great on iOS and OS X. Use the share sheet to subscribe to blogs. | | |
| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is what I use. It’s on macOS too and amazing on both. Super fast, focused, and efficient. It’s by far the best I’ve tried. Most other macOS readers aren’t memory managing their webviews properly which leads to really bad memory leaks when they’re open for long periods. |
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| ▲ | vasco 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful. |
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| ▲ | susam 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I have never seen RSS clients or crawlers preload actual HTML pages. I've only seen them fetching the XML feed and present its contents to the users. When I talk about visitors arriving at my website from RSS feeds, I am not counting requests from feed aggregators or readers identified by their 'User-Agent' strings. Those are just software tools fetching the XML feed. I'm not talking about them. What I am referring to are visits to HTML pages on my website where the 'Referer' header indicates that the client came from an RSS aggregator service or feed reader. It is entirely possible that many more people read my posts directly in their feed readers without ever visiting my site, and I will never be aware of them, as it should be. For the subset of readers who do click through from their feed reader and land on my website, those visits are recorded in my web server logs. My conclusions are based on that data. | | |
| ▲ | miladyincontrol 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > I have never seen RSS clients or crawlers preload actual HTML pages Some setups like ttrss with the mercury plugin will do that to restore full articles to the feed, but its either on-demand or manually enabled per feed. Personally I dont run it on many other than a few more commercial platforms that heavily limit their feed's default contents. Presumably some the more app based rss readers have such a feature, but I wouldnt know for certain. |
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