Warning: Techno-babble ahead this time. If you get to this site with a good old-fashioned bookmark in your browser, nothing should change for you and you’ve got no need to panic.
If you’re one of the handful of readers using the RSS feed feature, either directly in your browser or via a separate RSS reader service (e.g. Newsblur, Feedly, etc.), I have to let you know that I’m disabling the feeds for the site over this coming weekend. I’m leaving them up until then so this message gets out but after that you’re going to need to use an ordinary bookmark in your browser and visit the site regularly to check in on my corner of Canada. I may add some form of basic ‘subscription’ methodology to send out emails when updates are added if there’s enough demand but it would of course be simple, zero cost, and spam-free. Stay tuned on that front.
Why am I doing this you ask? Isn’t this the equivalent of taking the stage coach instead of the bullet train? Well yes, it is a bit similar. A techno throwback if you will but for a site like mine where there aren’t twenty-gadzillion updates a day, RSS isn’t a big help and offers little in the way of improvement over old-fashioned methods. Much in the same way that I still write letters on paper with ink and seal them with a hot blob of red wax. I’m such a Luddite at times when it comes to technology but then I turn around and want to install solar panels everywhere and engineer a garden thermometer tracking system. I’m an exercise in personality contrast that way.
The idea of RSS feeds is a pretty good one. A simplified stream of info to let you know when something gets added to a site. If that only happened between us, it would be fine. The problem comes with hyperactive ‘feed aggregators’. For those unfamiliar, they’re services that automatically read RSS feeds from multiple sites and digest the articles into a single user interface. Again, not a bad idea in theory but in practice it creates all sorts of headaches on my end of the equation.
I’m not pointing the finger at one particular aggregator, foreign or domestic, because they all do the same thing to some extent. And to be fair some of them have been very helpful in mitigating the issues but after a few weeks jousting at those data windmills, there are some that are downright stubborn, unresponsive, or simply don’t care about the resulting mess. A few bad apples as it were. Apart from the significant increase in ‘hollow’ traffic – automated hits to the site that have no real user behind them – it makes a complete pig’s ear out of the logs I need to watch to be more responsive to reader’s interests. Maybe that’s partly my fault for not having more elaborate tracking installed but as most of you know I’m not fond of the Big Brother approach to web spaces (or anything else) and don’t serve any advertising here. The amount of effort to maintain and assimilate high-level analytics for a one-horse operation like me would mean there would be no time left for cooking and writing let alone responding to real reader’s questions.
To give you an example, last week there were barely two dozen visits from actual people that got here via an RSS aggregator. In that same time frame, I got over 1300 hits from automated bots (that can be differentiated from web crawlers working for the likes of Google and Bing) trying to feed those aggregators. While that’s not enough to effect the bandwidth or operating costs of a tiny site like mine yet, it does mean that in order to see what interests those few brave souls in the mix I have to sift through all those hits. I’m sure there are plug-ins that would help me do that sort of culling the wheat from the chaff but honestly, they probably wouldn’t be free enough for me to justify installing. Keeping it simple and old-school means more time and money for the important stuff. Like making oatmeal biscuit videos.
There’s also been a steady increase in malicious traffic, mostly from overseas, that is using the RSS feed as a way to ‘farm’ information like page addresses to use in more dubious endeavours. A few outfits in Russia particularly can sweep the site in seconds via an RSS feed and get a hundred new pages to target, copy, or worse. A bit like sticking a burglar alarm on the side of your house, I’m hoping the lack of feeds will encourage them to simply move to an easier target. Thankfully there are some free tools that have helped me fend off most of their intrusions over the past few months and those will certainly remain in place.
So RSS aggregator friends, I’m asking you to bookmark like it’s 1995 and simply visit more often to see what I’ve been up to on occasion. Sorry if this puts you off but it’s the best solution I can find at the moment. Rest assured I’ll keep on the lookout for a way to reinstate them and should one pop up, I’ll keep you in the data-spreading loop.
