Note

At the time of writing this article this website did not have an RSS feed, now it does. The realization came after discussions online where the sentiment can be boiled down to: There is no need to worry, pick your battles, and accept that some things are outside of an author's control.

An author cannot be held responsible for how books are consumed, shared, or used — posting online should be no different.

The hidden psychological cost of maintaining an RSS feed #

You launch your RSS feed thinking it's a nice touch; a low-maintenance way to share your work with people who have explicitly subscribed to your content.

There is no need to worry about hitting some social network API rate-limit, no documentation-rabbit-hole trying to figure out how to integrate what with what; just an xml file with deterministic updates. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing — until you check your logs.

The Tyranny of the Log File #

By looking at your logs, you changed everything. Before you checked, your RSS feed was an abstract gateway into your content. It was just another sitemap.xml, but that is no more. The "nice touch" has been replaced by concrete side-effects; it's measurable, and a constant reminder that your actions have reach.

A thousand clients, all checking in for updates.

You look at the logs again, try to analyze patterns. 100 requests per hour some days, 200 if you are lucky. Every passing minute a handful of little HTTP requests arriving at your server, all hungry for new content to publish for their masters.

• This is when your RSS feed becomes a voice in the back of your head.
• This is when your RSS feed is no longer "just a neat little feature".
• This is when the panic sets in.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and apparently an RSS feed is a meal so big that even looking at it made me sick. What originally was meant to be a cherry on top of the dessert (I have high hopes for my blog) had suddenly become the main course, and way too much for my stomach.

The Meal I Never Ordered #

When I started blogging back in 2015 my desire was an outlet for my sometimes crazy ideas. Call me a naive, but all I wanted a place where I was in control of the contents, a place where I felt free to post whatever I wanted. As you might have understood already, that did not happen.

I didn't understand it at first. I had built the infrastructure. The static site generator was perhaps not elegant, but it worked. Deploying updates was easy, just a git push and a few seconds of waiting. There was nothing that technically stopped me from publishing more content.

So why did I feel a heavy weight every time I opened my text editor?

The answer came to me slowly: I had readers now. Not too many, but enough. Real people. And somewhere in my head, a contract had been signed. A contract I never consciously agreed to, but a contract which was binding nonetheless.

The blog was no longer just mine.

The Slack In The System #

What made it worse was realizing that most of my subscribers weren't even people in the traditional sense. They were systems. Some were personally managed RSS readers, sure, but many were automated crawlers, content aggregators, and worst of all; there were a ton of Slackbots.

A blog post I wrote wasn't just something I published into the void.

• It was being automatically posted to company Slack channels.
• It was potentially being discussed in meetings, be that peer to peer or weekly stand-ups.
• It was something which could wake up a developer in the middle of the night simply because said developer had forgotten to turn off their Slack notifications.

All I did was add an RSS feed, but suddenly I could not write anymore, suddenly all those logs made any potential typo, any potential mistake, or any unpopular opinion (no matter how small) a too big of a risk.

"I do not want to disappoint, let's wait for a better topic" I kept telling myself, but no matter how hard I tried, and no matter how many drafts I wrote, I never felt they were good enough.

Why This Blog Does Not Have An RSS feed (yet) #

The simple answer is that I'm not ready.

I know myself well enough to understand that if I implement an RSS feed, I will check the logs. And I will keep tailing them, analyzing patterns that most likely means little to nothing in the grand scheme of things, but I for sure will be there.

So instead I'm choosing to publish content that people have to actively seek out. A deliberate click is different from a passive subscription added to slack clients which I never thought would see nor discuss my words.

Who knows, perhaps a future version of me has matured enough to add one, or maybe I will make a separate feed for my individual tags — but I fear even that will make it harder to post.

Reflection #

Perhaps I am overthinking this, and perhaps one should never see a constantly hit RSS feed as anything other than a sign of content being appreciated. And I do wonder... what could make it easy to write while still making written content easily accessible?

• Perhaps I could make it so that my RSS feed only include articles with at least N impressions?
• Perhaps I could lock away my log files in a place not easily accessible?
• Perhaps I can tell myself that logs are simply rows of data without meaning?
• Perhaps I could... well, I don't know.

I am genuinely curious for a solution, and will be sure to read all comments at the post at hackernews. If you have insights or ideas, please feel free to reach me at filip.roseen@atch.se.

Best Regards,
Filip Roséen