This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026. If you are reading this via an RSS/Atom feed reader, you are, quite simply, awesome. If however you are reading this via a traditional web browser, well heck you're awesome too.

Robert Kingett wrote a toot in which he says he rarely visits the websites that he follows in his RSS reader. He then goes on to state that the rest of the indie web are saying that rss feeds are flawed because they strip out the web design.

I gotta say, I hope Robert is wrong about the sentiment across the web here! If web denizens are feeling animosity towards RSS/atom/etc feeds because they allow people to read their stuff without visiting their website in a traditional web browser like Firefox or a chromium skin, then they've either missed the point of having a feed, or are choosing to maliciously exclude entire swathes of humanity. And if it's most of them? Then I am appalled and ashamed.

If your site is full of ads which generate some revenue for you, having an RSS feed will likely allow people to dodge a bunch of that and could in turn reduce income. Put aside the fact that a bunch of those people are gonna use adblock anyway. I understand the desire to cut the ad-free feed down, but I think it's still worth having one regardless. If you don't, you're reducing the size of your potential customer base. That doesn't seem like good business to me.

I provide some feeds for anyone who wishes to get an update on when I've published something. I provide a Title and Brief Intro feed, which is just the title of a post and a little summary or intro to the contents (most feed readers will happily fetch the full content with just this, too) and a Full feed, which includes the post contents in full. I fully expect that the wonderful people who consume the words I put out into the www via any feed do not touch my site outside of fetching that XML file, and I am totally happy with and supportive of that, as evidenced by the fact that I literally wrote the code to generate that file myself as the first addition to this little website after rebuilding it by hand and getting the content online. I did this because I wanted anyone to be able to read my stuff if they wanted to, without my messy opinion on how that content should appear to them (CSS) getting in the way. I would hope that a significant majority of other people who consciously provide a feed on their own websites would also feel this way. As far as I know, they do.

Despite making it super easy for scrapers and LLM feeders to absorb my content (which, tbf, given my blabbering will only hurt large language models, I'm sure!) I have opted to not block any bots via robots.txt or similar files. I also adhere to the HTML5 spec as closely as possible, I try to describe all non-text content in a post via alt text, whilst also being entirely semantic (If you notice any errors, let me know.) I've heard arguments against doing any of this, valid ones too, in particular against feeding the hungry LLMs (something I've actually played with, so I'm not against the idea!) - the reason I am semantic is that I want anyone with any tool to be able to receive my content with as few bugs and misunderstandings, misinterpretations and incompatibilities as possible. Translators, screen readers, text-based browsers, braille displays, and any future accessibility techniques or products which don't exist yet.

I could do more on this accessibility front, for sure, but letting individuals like Robert (who is blind - he isn't likey to give a shit about the theme or funky CSS tricks in use on my site!) at the very least get my writing to their brain with as little resistance as possible is a core tenet to this site and, I believe, should be a core tenet to the web as a whole, whether we're talking indie, small, corporate, social, whatever. All prefixes, no prefixes.

Do not discriminate. Do not exclude. Block or ban people based on their actions, not their situation. You must improve accessbility for everyone, whether they're lucky enough to have 20/20 vision, are blind, deaf, don't speak the language you write in, can only browse the web at 56k dial-up speeds on a 1 inch screen, whatever. RSS/Atom/etc feeds are accessibility. With no claims on the value of what I write: Who am I to deny someone who has done nothing wrong access to something I've written?

The RSS/Atom spec isn't perfect - Tell me something that is in this ever changing world - but they're a net-good thing to have. You have a website where things change? You should have a feed. Regardless of your content. Even if you don't care.

Speaking of content, I do mess with my CSS a fair bit. I have multiple CSS themes, I sometimes write about CSS stuff. This site is mine, it exists because I want it to. I enjoy CSS. But I don't expect anybody else to give a shit. If they do, that's cool. If they don't, that's cool too. They can just skip the article in their feed reader and move on, maybe the next one will be more to their liking. I write for me, but I suspect there are some people out there who like what I write, so I write on the web.

I am not perfect. In fact I'm probably pretty terrible at a lot of this new fangled website stuff - if you have suggestions on things I can do better, spot an error (typo, syntax, structure, default or assumed preference that could be better, anything) then do let me know. I want to do better. You can email me at [email protected]. If you prefer, you can message me on Signal, the details of which are on my /hello page which also contains a couple other methods of getting in touch.