Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

indieweb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 261 posts

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#41

Post by ronbenton »

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…

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

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#42

Post by susam »

vasco wrote: post #39
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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#43

Post by stogot »

theturtletalks wrote: post #35
merelysounds wrote: post #24

> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.

How does Buffer[0] operate then? Even an open-source alternative to Buffer, Postiz[1], offers Instagram. 0. https://buffer.com 1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app

Wasn’t Buffer something else in the past? Did they pivot?

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#44

Post by threetonesun »

ronbenton wrote: post #41
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…

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

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.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#45

Post by merelysounds »

theturtletalks wrote: post #35
merelysounds wrote: post #24

> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.

How does Buffer[0] operate then? Even an open-source alternative to Buffer, Postiz[1], offers Instagram. 0. https://buffer.com 1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app

> How does Buffer operate then?

Buffer documents a number of workflows and limitations in their FAQs.

E.g. for a non-professional Instagram account, the user gets a notification to manually share a post via the Instagram app.

> you can prepare your post in Buffer, receive a notification on your mobile device when it’s time to post, then tap the notification and copy your post over to the social network to finish posting.

source: https://support.buffer.com/article/658-using-notification-pu...

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#46

Post by jamietanna »

simonw wrote: post #9

I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so. I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.

Have you looked at https://posseparty.com/ as a possible option? Supports integrations with those platforms and more, and "all" it needs is an Atom feed!

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#47

Post by jamietanna »

I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#48

Post by nicbou »

This is my approach and I fully recommend it. My personal website is my canonical home address on the web. It has outlived a few platforms and many rounds of enshittification.

A few caveats:

- You will have different communities on each social network. Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users, it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of choice.

- Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly different messaging. This is partly due to the format each platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different conversations.

- Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine participant in each community, even if you just repost the same stuff. Automation does not help much there.

- RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control, and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly want to follow you might never see your updates.

- You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on the internet, and it should stay yours

- People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#49

Post by theturtletalks »

merelysounds wrote: post #45
theturtletalks wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Buffer[0] operate then? Even an open-source alternative to Buffer, Postiz[1], offers Instagram. 0. https://buffer.com 1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app

> How does Buffer operate then? Buffer documents a number of workflows and limitations in their FAQs. E.g. for a non-professional Instagram account, the user gets a notification to manually share a post via the Instagram app. > you can prepare your post in Buffer, receive a notification on your mobile device when it’s time to post, then tap the notification and copy your post over to the social network to finish post…

Postiz docs show that users can create an app on Facebook and use that key and it will auto post.

I guess using POSSE for Instagram forces you to either create a personal app on Facebook which is not easy or make your Instagram account a business account.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#50

Post by tolerance »

simonw wrote: post #9

I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so. I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.

I know it’s gotten some push back but to be honest I’m fond of the more manual approach that you take on HN.

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.

Post reply on HN