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Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

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Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#81

Post by foxfired »

mtlynch wrote: post #74
foxfired wrote: post #21

I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers. I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025

> the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers. 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 you…

You are right, my statement may be a bit misleading or incomplete. The ~500 readers are not just local rss bots, but they include aggregate RSS bots. For example, I see the feedly reporting ~200 subscribers, newsreader reporting 50 subscribers, feedbin, etc. Each of those only have between 1 to 3 ip addresses. So for each RSS bot, there are an arbitrary number of actual users reading. I can't track those accurately.

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.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#82

Post by cdrnsf »

I take this approach with everything I post, though I only syndicate to Mastodon. I have an RSS and JSON feed for each of the content types (they all have different schema) on my site: posts, links, books, movies, concerts, status updates and a combined feed. I also maintain an ICS calendar subscription of upcoming album releases.

These items, in turn, can be optionally syndicated to Mastodon when published. For status updates, I have a field that supports Mastodon-specific text (for mentions and so forth).

I also expose an oembed endpoint that returns the appropriate data for each content type for platforms that support it.

Everything I read is from RSS feeds I follow via freshRSS. Links are saved to linkding and are transformed into TTS "podcasts" that are sent to audiobookshelf.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#83

Post by data_base »

neilv wrote: post #75
susam wrote: post #37

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 s…

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 t…

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/

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#84

Post by simonw »

tolerance wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely won't be automating submission to places like HN. 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.

No, no, perhaps you misunderstood me. I like how you link to your own writing in the discussions here. I don't suspect you to start automating that. 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 person…

According to Plausible in the last 12 months my traffic has been 38% "direct/no referrer", 25.5% Google, 12.5% Hacker News, 8.3% Twitter.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#85

Post by carlosjobim »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #76
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have a recommended iOS RSS feed reader?

NetNewsWire is great on iOS and OS X. Use the share sheet to subscribe to blogs.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#86

Post by [deleted] »

hoherd wrote: post #61

One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook wall". This essentially let you use any third party that supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed. Facebook removed that feature. The effect of thi…

[deleted]

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#87

Post by neilv »

rednafi wrote: post #80
neilv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

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.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#88

Post by ModernMech »

rednafi wrote: post #80
neilv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

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.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#90

Post by MichaelWhi »

crashabr wrote: post #59

The concept seems trivial and widely used by many existing bloggers (and the default for most media outlets) so I feel like I'm missing something.

I also thought this and didn’t get the point. But the link was published 2013 and maybe for users not used to personal blogs but only social media nowadays it’s worth mentioning…
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