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).
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.)
[1]: https://rednafi.com
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Then, when Twitter started supporting longer tweets, I started publishing essays and it got the job done.
But at the end of each year, it was really hard to trace all my posts and write reviews about them. That's exactly what brought me to POSSE. I've been maintaining my blog[1] since early 2020 and it feels really good to know that I own my stuff. Plus, over the years, it has opened up so many doors for me.
Too bad many of these walled-garden platforms have now started to demote posts if they contain external URLs. I'm battling that by posting the links as a comment to the original post, which contains a cover photo of the blog.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
Has anybody written about adapting POSSE for videos?
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.
Does anyone know of any mobile friendly static site generators?
I think I have about 3000 blog articles between Substack and Blogspot.
Sure, the UX is not that great as with a dedicated interface like substack, but building a Hugo site is really just editing markdown files anyway, most mobile git enabled editors should be able to do that.
POSSE (the concept linked here) is overrepresented in relation to revealed preference. PESOS (publish elsewhere, syndicate on site) is more compatible with how most people (including nerds) actually use the Internet; for all the talk about static site generators and "owning" your own "digital garden" >9/10 people would fall somewhere on the embarrassing part of the curve from the "Blogging vs. Blog Setups" comic. <https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/>
If you migrated to a fediverse instance with longer post length limits, you could use that to actually blog/post while mobile, and meanwhile you have a script on your homepage that "lazily" syncs those posts to your static site—
When anyone visits your homepage, they see your site as it was when you last built it.
When you visit your own homepage, it automatically fetches your social media feed, patches the previous input to the SSG with the new content, and then uses the APIs of whatever you're using to host your site for rolling out the new posts.
However, I suffer from a lack of high-quality news sources, no matter whether they support RSS. They no longer publish online these days. And, realistically, I am not interested in most post from people I am interested in. So I just manually poll some times a month in my browser.
Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:
Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.
https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
MIT and open source no documentation yet. But coming very soon
I love hn and was inspired by all the devs who have their own site. I was drowning in work, but put the Django architecture together on vacation, started putting things together today and it’s been a blast.
I don’t enjoy social media and was thinking to posse intrinsically.
I appreciate this post and the authors perspective.
If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.
I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static sites, but when you really consider the full stack and frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd party external services they're having to depend on, they'd have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just written themselves a custom backend from the start.
I've noted here before a course from Arlington UT about this on Edx "Data, Analytics, and Learning" (2014).
Nice to have another way of describing this pattern of writing and publishing, even if it does have a funny name POSSE.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46015121 https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/19117279/CSC...
Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055
A website to destroy all websites
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.
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...
Or, you can use any of the many community projects which handle all this backend stuff and provide it as a service.
Either extreme works. I love the indieweb set of protocols for this. Other things like ActivityPub require active interaction for the cryptographic handshake at a minimum and make simple solutions infeasible despite other benefits. Indieweb can be as complex or as simple as you want.
Focus on publishing your own work. Syndicate if it’s effortless, otherwise don’t worry about it.
Blogging lives! :)
They wouldn't even need to host them anywhere, just have the same text on a device they own and control.
So fucking much is lost when a FB group just suddenly disappears along with all of the time people have spent writing on them.
I came across Posse Party and Postiz, both of which are self-hosted. It doesn't seem like either is built for this use case.
Which direction would you go in?
https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml gets flung to 8 social accounts
https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
That's almost a job in itself because you have to constantly make sure not to get shadowbanned. This is probably only an option for people who already use "social media" sites in the first place. Putting a link to your site in forum signatures was the way to go. Unfortunately, forums are 99% dead.
When I tried reddit I also noticed that I was shadowbanned by default and didn't even bother to do anything about because I assumed it would turn out the same way. Like I said you can use those sides to get the word out, but only if you're actively using them as a user to begin with.
I wrote my own SSG because I operate a website for a living and had specific needs. Prior to that I ran Craft CMS on the professional website and Wordpress on the personal one.
The benefit of SSGs is that the technical effort is tied to publishing. Once it’s online it stays online. You have both the human-readable source content and the static site. With traditional CMS there is a constant effort required to keep the website running. My dockerized Craft website wouldn’t start on the first few tries after a year offline.
SSGs are fantastic for building long-lasting websites with a low maintenance burden.
My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.
But this is no longer available.
You have to copy and paste the article into Medium manually unfortunately.
I guess it could just be done as a multi phase post, as janky as that is.
You can inspect and see the JS. There are a few others doing this too!
Personally, I prefer using webmentions. I got them back to my site using a combination of services, so if someone talk about a post I made in bluesky or mastodon, I usually get a webmention back to the post.
I've found that "POSSE" is shifting more toward "Publish on Own Site, Manually Link Elsewhere."
Paradoxically, ActivityPub (mastodon/fediverse) is the only place where true automated syndication is still reliable. I think the future of POSSE isn't trying to hack together API keys for walled gardens, but treating your personal site as a fedi instance so the syndication is native.
For example: This is rss for Simon Willison: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/rss
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
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.
I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/ your employer.
Anyone got experience to share in that regard?
Thinking about this famous precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195#27425041
When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got acquired my a major corporation that did have business interests which overlapped with my side projects, I refused the bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving about a year later.
Don’t get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
But it's not an either/or proposition.
Also, keep in mind that POSSE and this site predate LLMs by quite a bit.
Some people are just using it to post more garbage into the platforms they already were using
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
