4 ms·
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a
by foxfired 11mo ago
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W
- ctxc 11mo agoWow. A few questions: - I recently added RSS to my blog. The URL works but I don't advertise it with the icon. Should I? - What do you use to track traffic?
- foxfired 11mo agoI don't use the icon, but at the end of every article I have the "Follow me via RSS Feed" as a direct link to the RSS. As far as tracking the rss traffic, this graph is generated from my server logs. It is literally cat apache logs | grep my feed url | awk daily traffic | sort. Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a report I'm working on for the end of the year.
- adiabatty 11mo agoDo you also have something like <link rel=alternate href=/atom.xml type=application/atom+xml> in your <head> element? Things like this let me just throw homepages (or blog pages) at feed readers and they can discover all the different feeds available and I can pick one (although you really don't need more than one, generally).
- simonw 11mo agoI hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy! I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it: Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; ) Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedstats/utils.py https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...
- firefoxd 11mo agoOof, mine says 68 for feedly. I got some catching up to do. I'll ask AI to draw a pelican reading RSS news.
- mythrwy 11mo agoBut how will they know what they like if they haven't read it?