on this site. That's why it appears before any comments. This should<br>be the only comment block where the next line after the end of the comment is not the one being discussed!
In the olden days, it used to be much more complex, but HTML5 simplified it (thankfully!) Technically the 'DOCTYPE' bit can be lower case or mIxEd CaSe or<br>whateVER CASe you WANt, however in XHTML5 the 'doctype' part must be in upper case, so I've just settled on that. It's just a habit to type it out this way.<br>-->
contains the... well, the title of the page! Web browsers will show this in the tab in your browser, or use it to name the page if you bookmark<br>it<br>--><br>RSS/Atom Feeds are Critical - fyr.io
tag opened earlier with the following:<br>-->
and the - I wonder why that is.
Anyway, from this point on, we're giving the web browser or client software direct instructions on what to *render* - this is typically what is shown on<br>a visual display, but could be used in other ways that are not obvious to some, for example: what is read aloud by a screen reader used by a blind person
We start by declaring that this is where the content begins via the
🎨
Verdant (default)<br>Paper (day)<br>Paper (night)<br>Red Alert<br>Aurora<br>Naked<br>cHaOs
The Naked theme when selected is a rough approximation - click Apply to get the Real Deal.
element:<br>- homepage!<br>- 404!<br>- about!<br>- changelog!<br>- feeds (the page, not the individual feeds!)<br>- guestbook!<br>- hello!<br>- ideas!<br>- nope!<br>- scraps! (the index, not the posts themselves)<br>- slashpages! (the page itself)<br>- tools!<br>- AAAaaaaaaaaaaaa! ( /void! )<br>- vulns!<br>- wander!<br>- yep!<br>... that's all of the linked-to pages! Maybe there's more out there...<br>-->
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...