Please Help Me Follow Your Content
Finding good content in the swamp of AI slop is hard, and whenever I find a blog post worth reading, I’d like to know when the author publishes the next one.
For stupid reasons (like a day having only 24 hours, and me having a life), I can’t periodically scan all websites I find interesting, but fortunately, I don’t have to. Two well-known mechanisms work reliably: email updates and RSS feeds.
Ideas like “I’ll publish links on my social media” make us slaves to the engagement-farming algorithms, and there’s no guarantee those algorithms would show me stuff I would want to see anyway.
While it doesn’t hurt to publish links to your content on social media, I got so little traffic from Twitter that I stopped publishing stuff the moment they started charging for the API.
LinkedIn is a bit better (it’s the top referring site, responsible for ~6% of the incoming sessions), but at least I get some insightful comments (plus the mandatory dose of AI slop) because it’s easier to write them there than on my blog.
Imagine my dismay when I found an interesting blog post published on the owner’s own website (nice), powered by a pretty minimalistic HTML generator1 (awesome), but without an RSS feed.
Even worse, there’s no documented way to contact the author to tell him to add it to his site, and I refuse to go through the hassle of “Add a LinkedIn contact just so you can send him a short message”.
If you invest time into creating great content (thanks a million!!!) and decide not to feed the trolls2 (awesome decision BTW), pretty please do us old-timers a favor and add an RSS feed to your site. Most static website generators already have a template; you just have to enable/add it to your site.