A lot of websites dump the entire feed — that’s nice. Ideally for bandwidth efficiency, combine multiple delivery strategies.

1. A partial content feed (Atom preferred) limited to the last 3/5/10 posts for quick queries.

2. A full content RSS feed of a similar limit for fresh content.

3. A hidden/unlisted feed for dumping all content (mirror).

Alternatively, just implement atom’s collection partial lists for feed pagination. If your post bandwidth (size/frequency) is low, then pretend you didn’t see this — be lazy and optimize later.

Here’s a great article that implements reading webmentions natively in hugo. There’s always a soul out there who has tried what you’re thinking about.

Web mentions and reply by email? The first is easy thanks to webmention.io, but the second is very involved and requires a public email inbox setup.

Fun fact: fetching favicons from various domains is a dark art. Might seem trivial at first, but it’s very complicated. A simple request for a favicon.ico will net strange returns — like serving a text file as a favicon.ico.

Better to leverage a browser which excels at interpreting favicons or contact a CDN of a major search engine. Make sure to cache the results.

• https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip1/en.wikipedia.org.ico
• https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=en.wikipedia.org

The GUID is an interesting element in the RSS specification — yeah another post about RSS. You could hash the content of a post and commit to the idea that it shouldn’t change.

If a post changes, then the GUID would provide a trail of edits, with the drawback of possibly resurfacing an old post. This article from 15 years ago explores what feed readers did at the time when given a link and/or guid.

I’m not a podcast person, but this podcast index is rather handy. It appears that they’re gathering the disparate podcast namespaces into a collective RSS namespace — there’s even a podcast feed generator. Might be useful if you’re into podcasting.

Perhaps the only benefit of being behind a CGNAT on an increasingly centralizing Internet is conserving time. Playing the “are you human” captcha game is an excellent incentive for minimal browsing and off-lining as much software as possible.

Naming things is hard. For the times when you don’t know what or how to name things, there’s schema.org. Sometimes it helps.

ActivityPub

Microsoft Edge is poised to become a very popular browser. Seems like there are more tech savvy users on Edge versus Chrome. Online, people talk a lot about Firefox, but spotting someone using that browser is like finding a unicorn.