RSS Isn't Dead, You Forgot: A free API your readers run on their own machines

When Google shut Google Reader down on 1 July 2013, a lot of people read it as the funeral. I read it differently. The thing that died was a free product Google didn't want to staff. The format underneath kept working, and within weeks Feedly had pulled in three million of the orphaned readers. Nobody throttled them. Nobody re-ranked their feed. They just kept fetching.

I run an RSS feed alongside my email list, and the reason this book exists is that I kept noticing something I couldn't explain at first. Inbound conversations started opening with "I've been reading you in my feed reader for months." That sentence almost never came from a social follower. The people who bother to wire up a feed reader turn out to be the same people who later send a purchase order. I didn't plan that. I just stopped fighting it.

Substack takes ten percent of every subscription and still exposes an RSS feed by default, which tells you the format never went anywhere; it only went quiet because it generates no engagement number for anyone to sell ads against. This is a plain account of feed readers, conditional GET and the 304 response, Atom versus RSS, per-category feeds, JSON Feed, podcast enclosures, and the IndieWeb POSSE pattern, written for the operator who wants one distribution channel nobody else owns the dials on.

Written from running small businesses in Indonesia, but the diagnostics and the setup apply the same way to any small shop or emerging-market operator with a website and something to publish.