Posted by 47thpresident 2 days ago
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.
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
If you want to get a red line, you need to use red ink. If you use blue ink, you'll get blue lines. And I can draw you cat. (I'm no artist, but I can give it a try.) But it it won't be a line anymore. A line and a cat: those are two different things.
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.)
Browsers also never added support for some of the most fundamental features to support XSLT. Page transitions and loading state are particularly rough in XSLT in my experience.
One bonus is that it will be easier to customize for people that know JavaScript but don't know XSLT (which is a lot of people, including me).
You'll still need to add a line to the feed source code.
There's no real reason to take this position. A styled XML document is just another page.
For example, if you're using a static site generator where the front page of your /blog.html shows the most recent N posts, and the /blog/feed.xml shows the most recent N posts, then...?
I don't use it myself because my computer is too slow (I think they built it in node.js or something). But it makes me happy that someone is carrying the torch forward...
[1]: https://rednafi.com
PS: I found out I was already subscribed to your feed.
Yeah, the idea was that since RSS is still considered niche by the broader audience, those who are looking for it will probably find it just fine.
Also, your Segal's Law link seems to have an encoding issue with the apostrophe.
Also, weird, seems like I don't see the encoding issue on the segal's law.
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.
Here's an oldie but a goodie regarding RSS vs Atom [2]
[1]: https://ittavern.com/difference-between-rss-and-atom/
[2]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
You should just use Atom.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I only occasionally look at the HTTP 'Referer' header in my web server logs and filter them, out of curiosity. That is where I find that a large portion of my daily traffic comes via RSS feeds. For example, if the 'Referer' header indicates that the client landed on my website from, say, <https://www.inoreader.com/>, then that is a good indication that the client found my new post via the RSS feed shown in their feed aggregator account (Inoreader in this example).
Also, if the logs show that a client IP address with the 'User-Agent' header set to something like 'Emacs Elfeed 3.4.2' fetches my '/feed.xml' and then the same client IP address later visits a new post on my website, that is a good indication that the client found my new post in their local feed reader (Elfeed in this example).
Like:
- https://chrisburnell.github.io/interests-directory/
- https://bukmark.club/directory/
I find browsing and discovering fun. So, after years of lurking I decided to make my own directory. It is called Top Four (https://topfour.net).
A /top4 page is a personal webpage where you can share your definitive ranked list of your top 3 favorites and an honorable mention. In a specific topic, such as movies, albums, snacks, games, or anything else you feel strongly about. Or read the announcement: https://peterspath.net/blog/project-top-four/
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
1000x yes to this! It can be really frustrating when a link takes me to FB, TW, IG, etc. - none of which I use.
Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people had to create content within facebook instead of outside it. This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the creators chose the entire flow.
IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as a result.
He was always like this and never intended to create something actually valuable.
People use it to keep in contact with relatives and friends, I follow work groups, my mother took COPD therapy through Facebook and chatted with relatives in other countries. I think Hacker News has been so radicalized against social media and "algorithms" that they forget most people's relationship with social media is entirely mundane.
I refer to the video metrics scandal. How many video autoplay and other things has everyone felt obliged to copy because Zuckerberg (who seems to care about nobody) made FB into a fradulent company?
I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.
Snapchat features are blood money, they also result in less people using Snapchat
Nobody says Zuck doesn't earn a lot of money but a lot of it is likely fraudulent and he's just not a very good person
He's a POS, that's also why POSSE is good. ;)
Did he/didn't he steal? Dunno, though there's a fair few bits of evidence in the various lawsuits (Winklevoss, Greenspan)
But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)
I was willing to take his side on a few things because the political situation is genuinely unclear and the public has been misled but then right after he wrote the open letter to Jim Jordan about censorship coercion (which was a real problem, I want to see more tech companies talking about it) he does this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178
It's kind of like he has raw bits of intelligence but doesn't quite know how to piece it together and besides "his" inventions (even FB) are put together (largely?!) by other people
Yeah, that trying to trick Indians into that thing (IIRC, it was also called Free Basics or something like, to sound attractive, prolly) became a big issue in India at the time, I remember, although I didn't delve deep into the matter. I think a group of leading Indian freedom activists took on FB in the media and petitioned the government, and it resulted in the whole scheme collapsing.
This is what I was referring to in my earlier comment: "he's just not a very good person".
Like, all engineers are saints and the other side are all sinners. What crap. Get real, guys. There are all kinds of multicolored and multidimensional people.
Having been on all 3 or 4 or 5 of these sides :) (dev, sysadm, manager, consultant, ...), I have seen that.
Grow up, folks, and enjoy life in all its richness.
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A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11 years, but you can use just about anything.
What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats, webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites. The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human community.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.
Which is fine. Small is beautiful.
Then, if there is a viable alternative to big social media, my thesis is that there might come a day when a critical mass has been fed up and finds a viable alternative that's still beautiful but no longer small.
I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.
While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.
I figure if you chose to follow me on Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn there's no ethical issue at all with me automating the process of having my new blog entries show up in my feeds there, as opposed to copying-and-pasting the links by hand.
To tell you the truth I came to this actual submission to express my apathy toward the ‘POSSE’ concept but I saw you here and figured that I could somehow voice that feeling while simultaneously making mention of a sharing method that I do find worthwhile and more personable. And not an easy thing to pull off.
How much of your traffic comes from HN as opposed to the other platforms?
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages about what I am current working on, but the actual finished product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not result in lost information.
I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.
You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
However, users can click on an RSS feed article and read it directly on my blog. These have a URL param that tells me they are coming from the feed. When an article isn't on HNs frontpage, the majority of traffic is coming from those feeds.
By the way, thank you for sharing this tool. Very insightful.
I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content, mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work too, might consider that as well
But I also don't think I have the process in place to do Blog, YouTube, Podcast and hold a full time job. Yes the job is my source of income.
At some point you're getting sponsors to pay for it and then it get complicated.
I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.
Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ
RSS most certainly isn’t dead either. I run pagecord.com (indie blogging app) and the majority of traffic is from a huge variety of feed readers.