spinningmonkey
Patch ArcanaI AM ABSOLUTELY BEGGING Y'ALL.
If you are bringing back personal/hobby/small-business websites (and you should be), enable RSS.
And TLS, but that's a whole other thing.
(Regards TLS, I actually published a guide on how I best like to do it: https://www.arcanalabs.ca/guides/revproxy.html)
As far as RSS goes that gets complex too but less so than you'd think. Some static site generators do though.
Why would you put up with this hassle?
So that nerds like me can subscribe to your RSS feeds and be drawn back to your site when you update stuff.
Mandi@patcharcana I don't actually know what TLS is... Something new for me to learn!
ZahmbieND@mandikaye @patcharcana As a summary: TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a secure communication over a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) socket, allowing encrypted data to be sent over the internet.
Enabling TLS on a HTTP server allows access to HTTPS, encrypting all data sent to/from the server.
TLS includes certificates proving the identity of the server, and makes data practically unreadable and tamper-proof by all except the client and server.
Enabling TLS on a HTTP server allows access to HTTPS, encrypting all data sent to/from the server.
TLS includes certificates proving the identity of the server, and makes data practically unreadable and tamper-proof by all except the client and server.
@mandikaye @patcharcana Without TLS/HTTPS on a website, an attacker could:
- See secrets like passwords and uploaded files
- See what page you are viewing
- See the content of the page you are viewing
- Modify the text of the page to deceive the reader
With TLS enabled, all an attacker sees is:
- What server you're connected to
- Approximately how large the file is you're accessing
- See secrets like passwords and uploaded files
- See what page you are viewing
- See the content of the page you are viewing
- Modify the text of the page to deceive the reader
With TLS enabled, all an attacker sees is:
- What server you're connected to
- Approximately how large the file is you're accessing
David JONES@patcharcana have you found a good RSS guide for implementors? (my own static sites are built with my own static site generator)
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@patcharcana For my blog, I've got a PHP file that just builds the feed on the spot from the articles whenever you request it! Feels like magic.
Piko Starsider 
@patcharcana I stopped worrying about TLS when I switched to Caddy. Regardless of whether I use docker or not, it's a breeze to configure. A certificate is created automatically for any site name that doesn't have "http://". Those certificates are saved with a predictable file name so I used those certs elsewhere too.
ErgonWolf@patcharcana And webrings. We need to bring back webrings.
Colin Cogle 🔵@ErgonWolf @patcharcana There are a few special ones there, like 512KB Club, DarkTheme.club, and No-JS.club. Fediring is a nice generic one for HTTPS and Gemini sites, too.
Blue 
@ErgonWolf @patcharcana yesyesyesyes
Dio9sys@patcharcana Now I really wanna look into integrating RSS into gemini protocol. We already have gemini-based RSS readers, now we need RSS-based gemini readers
Felix@patcharcana yes please! i’m fleshing out my rss feeds again and i would LOVE to add cool small sites to get updates on everything but there are so few i’m finding now with rss i feel like
Oblomov@patcharcana I have RSS but not TLS, is that good enough? ;-)
Steve Laskevitch
Stellarator 🏳️🌈🌮@patcharcana Ooh, ooh! My newish comic website has both of those! As semi-furry/furry-adjacent, I believe this entitles me to headpats. :)
Seriously though, preach it. RSS is great and everywhere should use it. I follow many feeds myself.
Jamey Sharp@stellarator offers headpats
As someone who especially wants to see RSS and TLS in webcomics and other serialized works, thank you 😁
I've additionally been trying to advocate for full-history RSS feeds (https://toot.cat/@jamey/110612165540982772). Many webcomic creators I've talked with don't know what RSS is or why they would care, which is perfectly understandable, but since you do I'm curious what you think about the usual 10-post limit in most RSS feeds.
Jamey Sharp (@[email protected])
As I'm seeing an uptick in discussion about RSS again I guess I should try again to see if anyone else wants RSS feeds with more history than the newest 10 posts. RFC5005, "Feed Paging and Archiving", provides a comprehensive and well-designed mechanism for this. It was published in 2007 but has never had significant adoption that I can find. I've written a few implementations: a jekyll-feed PR (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed/pull/236), a WordPress plugin (https://github.com/jameysharp/wp-fullhistory), a proxy that adds history to unmodified WordPress feeds (https://github.com/jameysharp/wp-5005-proxy), and a simple demo of generating full-history feeds (https://github.com/jameysharp/predictable). I also wrote a blog post with a technical take on the connection between cache coherency and full-history feeds: https://jamey.thesharps.us/2020/08/06/feed-reader-cache-coherency/
Yay! :D
I was not aware of that limitation, but I also wasn't aware that you could have your feed have the FULL comics. That sounds like a neat idea, but wouldn't that totally spam to death any new subscriber? I'm currently at 280 pages.
But yeah, I got my own website and RSS feed because I absolutely hate reading comics via a daisy-chain of links on an image board, and I assumed other people did also.
@stellarator The exact limit is usually configurable depending on what software you run your site with; WordPress and others just default to the newest 10 posts. I know of one webcomic where the author hand-edits the RSS feed for every new post and has the complete history there (I think 700+ pages when I looked a few years ago), but that's unusual because having a single large feed is expensive in bandwidth costs. However, it's common among podcasts; somebody told me why, but I forget.
The method I advocate for still only has, say, 10 posts in the main feed, but that feed links to a series of older feed documents containing the rest of the history. That solves the problem of bandwidth costs, though it introduces some new complexities. To my dismay, it's not at all widely implemented, despite the standard for it having been published in 2007. (!)
I see the problem of how to present all that history to people as a separate issue: we have to have the data available before we can have a good conversation about what interaction modes work best with it. But I do have opinions about how to present webcomic history to readers, since I built a site which does that, 15 years ago 😁 (https://www.comic-rocket.com)
@jamey If I understood the link you sent correctly, this isn't something a person could just do, but something that would have to be added to the spec and used by RSS readers? Or do I misunderstand.
I don't know how far back my site's RSS feed goes. I'd have to check. It's a *super* simple bespoke thing just for my 3 series.
@stellarator Yeah, publishers have to add the right links, and feed readers have to add support for following those links. Neither is common right now so I'm not saying you should go do this immediately or anything, I was just curious what you'd think of it in general. Although there's no harm in adding support: if the feed reader doesn't understand these links then it will still see the newest handful of posts, just like it does today.
@jamey It certainly is an interesting idea. In my case it's probably just as easy to use my website itself, but it still seems like a cool feature for people who would want to use their own readers.
Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L.@patcharcana uhh may we use atom instead? >.<
Jason Becker@patcharcana it’s baffling to me that RSS is a thing that needs to be enabled some places versus on by default.
Clockwork ☃️✒️I'm learning how to build my little personal website and I'm trying really hard to add an RSS function, even if I won’t upload blogposts 😤
Mark Tomczak@patcharcana At this point, RSS is so automated into the tools I see for blogging and such that it should be something you don’t even need to turn on.
I’m pretty sure Hugo just maintains an RSS feed out-of-the-box, for example.
Rick Ekle@patcharcana TLS can be added for free using LetsEncrypt
Hope@patcharcana Yes please I still enjoy RSS!
Cory Joseph@patcharcana I’m on board for RSS. But I have to ask why? For TLS on what is a static blog?
luna the doggie 
Photo Ewen 📷I have tried hard to live my life without WordPress (not completely successfully I admit!), so rolling my own website and CMS allowed me to integrate both the photo essays and blog posts into a single RSS feed.
I deeply wish this simple solution to sharing updates was more popular than FB.
Anyways...
@patcharcana largely agreed although Atom is a much nicer spec than RSS and supported just as widely
@patcharcana also TLS is way easier to do with Caddy than nginx. You'd only need one docker container at most and the basic configuration that sets up TLS with Let's Encrypt via ACME is just:
yourdomain.example.com {
reverse_proxy http://localhost:8080 # assuming your web server is on port 8080
}This will also automatically enyable QUIC as long as you open UDP port 443 in your firewall.
And Caddy can act as a server for a static website by itself, then you use the
file_server directive instead of reverse_proxy.@patcharcana bring back Web rings!
Wyatt (🏳️⚧️♀?)@patcharcana i already did. :\
It felt like a logical thing to do.
RSS feed gets updated when I am confident posts are worth reading (and no longer are under construction), which is why not all posts are in the feed, but I do update it when I feel ready to. PC-98 post coming to RSS feed Soon™.
https://megatokyo.moe/blog/rss.xml
It felt like a logical thing to do.
RSS feed gets updated when I am confident posts are worth reading (and no longer are under construction), which is why not all posts are in the feed, but I do update it when I feel ready to. PC-98 post coming to RSS feed Soon™.
https://megatokyo.moe/blog/rss.xml
sarah tonin 
@patcharcana im working on website rn and there's both rss and atom
partly because hakyll supports them easily, but if it didn't, i would have just hacked it in myself
big fan of tangerines whirls 
@patcharcana i did the absolute bare minimum for rss support in my half-baked ssg, partially because datetime is hard if you don’t know the programming language you use actually has it
trip - with Anarcho-Cougarism!