If I have to tell you “these are only my opinions” then you are too stupid to be reading this and should leave my website now.
Everyone is different. I’m going to tell you how you should be doing things with your website and podcast with the intention of making “people like me” happy. I don’t think most people are like me. In fact I’d say people like me are scarce. Make your own choice based on the information I present.
RSS Feed
Have one. It’s not hard.
And for fuck’s sake, put a link to the RSS feed on your site. I shouldn’t have to search for the damn thing.
But Great One, why do I need an RSS feed? People should just come to my website.
I know. You have been told that “no one” uses RSS any more. I do. I have 93 websites in my RSS reader at this time. Another 101 feeds in my podcast RSS reader. Some sites appear in both as they are blogs and podcasts. It’s safe to say that I have around 150 websites which I follow on a regular basis.
I am not going to visit 150 sites every day to see if they have posted something new. I am not going to check 101 podcast sites to see if they have uploaded a new podcast and if so manually download it.
I will not be visiting your website daily. I have a life. Computers exist to automate tasks such as visiting 150 websites daily to see if they have new content.
But Great One, my writing, my podcasting is so important that you should make an exception for me.
No. It’s not. There are no exceptions to this. No RSS feed means you are dead to me. You know what else means you are dead to me? Having your RSS feed contain only the excerpt and not the full text of your post.
But Great One, if the excerpt catches your attention you should click on the link, go to my site and read the whole post.
Wrong. Which part of “I have a life” do you not understand? I do understand why you want people to go to your site. There are two reasons.
- Analytics.
- Advertising.
You want the page views in your analytics. You want me to see your advertising. And I’m not player hating you over it. I’m really not.
Analytics
Everyone – including me – likes to see hits on their website. Every time I get a traffic spike I cream my panties. As I’ve said in my podcast, humans desire the attention of other humans. We are social animals. Even the most anti-social of us (a group which includes me) desire attention from other people some of the time.
We also want to know people are visiting our sites, reading what we write, listening to our podcasts.
Here’s my counter point to all the attention whoring. That’s what your analytics are. Attention whoring.
Analytics verses Committed Readers
You have to decide which is ultimately more important. Analytics or people being able to read your writing in a way convenient for them. If you think not having a RSS feed, or having an RSS feed of only excerpts is going to force people to visit your site and impact your analytics you are putting analytics on a pedestal at the expense of your readers.
You might be a beta male.
Most people are not going to RSS your site. Most people don’t know what RSS is any more. Those who do know what RSS is will be told by some idiot that RSS is “dead”. The idiots who say this are most always social media or marketing “experts”. They are also all attention whores who masturbate to their bounce rate.
Just so you know, the bounce rate on this site hovers around 5% pretty consistently. And yes, I have wacked off while thinking about that.
Ask yourself this.
“What’s most important to me. Attention whoring or people reading what I write?”
Advertising
You are selling things to make money. I love selling things. I love making money. I want you to make money. If you make money then you don’t have to be a welfare parasite on those of us who work for a living. Of course if you make money you’ll become a host for the welfare parasites but that’s a different topic.
You want to bring people to your site to make money. Good move. And high page views in your analytics help you bring on advertisers to make money. Good move. I really do understand.
You want me to come to your site so I see the advertising, click a link, buy something, make money for you. Your thought is that if I RSS your site that will never happen.
When I RSS your site I will occasional click the link and actually visit your site. That’s when I’ll see your advertising. You may (or may not to be truthful) make money off me at some point.
If I’m not RSSing your site I’ll never click and link and go to your site. You will never make money off me.
If you plug the product in the text of your post then I’ll see the plug and maybe buy the product. Consider that.
I agree that making money is important. I think it’s less important than your readers. First make things easy for your readers. The money will follow. Maybe. Or it might not.
Ask yourself this.
“What is more important? My audience or getting my audience’s money?”
Trick question. Both are important.
You need money to keep your website running. Yet if you have no audience why have a website?
Unless you are me and don’t give a fuck about audience. As I’ve said over and over – I do this podcasting thing for me. Fucks given about you listening to my podcast would be zero.
How An RSS Feed May Benefit You
Let’s say you write things some people (femistatists for example) don’t like. Those people may launch an attack on your site and put it out of action. If you are hosted on WordPress.com or Blogspot or some other platform you may find your website shutdown by the hosting company for not being tolerant and sensitive enough.
Or your website may be having an outage. Servers do go down. As should your girlfriend. But I digress.
In fact as I’m writing this I am also bouncing around on the interwebz and I notice that Judgy Bitch’s website is down. Is it just a technical outage? Are the femistatists attacking her site? Who knows. But I can still read her post about why women should not vote because it’s in my RSS reader.
How An RSS Feed Benefits Your Readers
If they store your feed locally as I do they have access to your feed even when not connected to the internet. I know those of you under 30 have no idea of what “not connected to the internet” means. There was a time when most computers were not connected to the internet. Even today there may be places on the planet that do not have wi-fi.
Oh shit, I should have put a trigger warning on that.
Yes. Places do exist on Earth without wi-fi.
I can hit some wi-fi, update my feeds, then read them while riding in a car, or in a place with no public wi-fi, even while fucking your girlfriend. The possibilities are endless.
It also save me time. Lots of time. Lots of going to websites and downloading podcasts time. Did I mention I have a life?
I can organize what I read. I can code posts with colours and stars. Keep track of what I have and haven’t read. And one of the best things of all . . .
A RSS Feed Preserves Your Ideas After You Are Gone (From The Interwebz and From Life)
A great example of this is the website Observing The Decline. The writer lost interest because he had a life and ran out of disposable time. He allowed his hosting service to expire and his website it gone. But I still have his posts in my RSS reader. Thus I was able to make his series “Got Privilege” available as a PDF file.
http://CynLibSoc.com/cls/pdf/Got-Privilege.pdf
Otherwise his words would have been lost in time like tears in rain.
Trigger Warning! My Opinion.
I don’t give a fuck about my site stats. I want you to RSS my site. I want you to store my words and podcasts locally. And after the government kills me I want you to post those words (typos and all) and podcasts (fuckups and all) on the interwebz.
I have thrown my ideas into the public forum and I chose not to fear their dissemination. I choose not to fear my Google analytics not showing as many hits as it could. I choose not to fear not selling you shit.
I choose to give zero fucks about attention whoring.
The Technical Stuff – Which RSS Reader To Use?
I know there are some online RSS readers. These seem stupid as fuck to me. They require you to have accounts, sign in, and in some cases require your Facebook logon. Plus they don’t store the information on your computer hard drive. Plus as will all such “services” they can vanish any time the company decides to shut them down.
My RSS readers store the data on my hard drive. They are open source. They require no logon or account creation. They harvest no data from my social media.
For RSSing blogs I use QuiteRSS. https://quiterss.org/
For RSSing podcasts and YouTube videos I use gPodder. http://gpodder.org/
And for fuck’s sake – those of you using shit like SoundCloud or who only make your podcast available via iTunes. You people really piss me off. SoundCloud is shit. If you use SoundCloud please find your RSS URL and post a link to it.
The only thing more of a shit sandwich is iTunes. If you use iTunes and only iTunes I will never listen to your podcast.
If you are looking for a RSS feed for a SoundCloud podcaster – or don’t and will not use iTunes – here is a tool that can help you find a link to RSS to their feed:
Get RSS feeds from SoundCloud & iTunes urls: http://getrssfeed.com
How to get a RSS feed for a YouTube channel without subscribing to the channel.
- Go to the YouTube channel you want to track
- View the page’s source code
- Look for the following text: channel-external-id
- Get the value for that element (it’ll look something like UCBcRF18a7Qf58cCRy5xuWwQ
- Replace that value into this URL:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCBcRF18a7Qf58cCRy5xuWwQ
Now you can paste that into any RSS reader and you’ll be able to track when new content is posted.