https://syndicator.net/blog Syndicator Blog en https://syndicator.net/blog/conditional-get-with-etag-and-last-modified-cuts-rss-polling-costs/ A feed reader asks the same question over and over. Anything new? Most of the time the answer is no, and the server sends the whole feed anyway. Conditional GET lets the server answer no in a few hundred bytes instead. RSS HTTP web performance feed readers Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/conditional-get-with-etag-and-last-modified-cuts-rss-polling-costs/ https://syndicator.net/blog/how-rss-feeds-carry-images-podcasts-and-video-with-enclosures-and-media-rss/ An RSS item is text: a title, a link, a description. Files ride along in two ways. The old one is the enclosure element, which is how every podcast on earth is delivered. The richer one is Media RSS, a namespace that describes images and video in detail. Plenty of feeds use both. RSS Media RSS podcasts photography Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/how-rss-feeds-carry-images-podcasts-and-video-with-enclosures-and-media-rss/ https://syndicator.net/blog/how-syndicator-keeps-one-broken-feed-from-emptying-the-front-page/ An aggregator depends on dozens of servers it doesn't control. At 114 feeds, something is always a little broken. A site is down for maintenance. A feed times out. A plugin update starts emitting junk. So the useful question is what a build should do when a feed fails, because one usually will. Syndicator RSS developer tools Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/how-syndicator-keeps-one-broken-feed-from-emptying-the-front-page/ https://syndicator.net/blog/how-websub-lets-rss-feeds-push-updates-instead-of-waiting-to-be-polled/ Feeds are pull by default. A reader asks your server every so often whether anything changed. Usually nothing did. Multiply that by every subscriber and every reader app and you get a lot of requests for very little news. It's also slow: a post can sit unseen until the next poll, which might be an hour away. WebSub RSS feed readers Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/how-websub-lets-rss-feeds-push-updates-instead-of-waiting-to-be-polled/ https://syndicator.net/blog/opml-files-explained-for-moving-feed-subscriptions-between-readers/ If you have ever switched feed readers without retyping 200 URLs, you used OPML. It's the export file every reader offers and almost nobody opens. It's worth opening once, because it's tiny and plain, and knowing what's inside makes migrations less scary. OPML RSS feed readers Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/opml-files-explained-for-moving-feed-subscriptions-between-readers/ https://syndicator.net/blog/really-simple-licensing-puts-ai-usage-terms-inside-rss-feeds/ Really Simple Licensing, or RSL, borrows its name from RSS on purpose. It was launched in September 2025 by the RSL Collective, with Reddit, Yahoo and Medium among the early backers, and the 1.0 specification came out on December 10, 2025. Cloudflare, Akamai and Fastly endorsed it. Over 1,500 media organizations signed on. RSL RSS AI crawlers licensing Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/really-simple-licensing-puts-ai-usage-terms-inside-rss-feeds/ https://syndicator.net/blog/reddit-ends-rss-feeds-as-the-ai-scraping-fight-reaches-the-open-web/ Reddit picked November 13, 2026 as the day its RSS feeds stop working. The company announced it on September 30 in a post to moderators, together with a plan to close public access to its Data API in March 2027. The reason it gave was blunt. RSS, Reddit said, had become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. RSS Reddit AI crawlers syndication Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/reddit-ends-rss-feeds-as-the-ai-scraping-fight-reaches-the-open-web/ https://syndicator.net/blog/rss-feed-autodiscovery-and-the-link-tag-every-site-needs/ Most people never type a feed URL. They paste a site's home page into their reader and the reader finds the feed. That works because of one line in the page head, and a surprising number of sites don't have it. RSS feed autodiscovery web development Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/rss-feed-autodiscovery-and-the-link-tag-every-site-needs/ https://syndicator.net/blog/rss-vs-atom-vs-json-feed-which-feed-format-should-a-site-publish/ Three feed formats are still in real use. RSS 2.0, Atom and JSON Feed all do the same basic job. They hand a reader app a list of your newest posts with titles, links, dates and some content. Any decent reader handles all three. So the choice matters less than people think, but it still matters a little, and the reasons are worth knowing. RSS Atom JSON Feed feed formats Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/rss-vs-atom-vs-json-feed-which-feed-format-should-a-site-publish/ https://syndicator.net/blog/running-a-feed-aggregator-on-cloudflare-pages-with-a-twice-daily-rebuild/ A static site only changes when you rebuild it. For a blog that's fine, since you rebuild when you publish. For an aggregator it's the whole problem. The content belongs to 114 other sites, and they publish whenever they like. Syndicator Cloudflare static sites GitHub Actions Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/running-a-feed-aggregator-on-cloudflare-pages-with-a-twice-daily-rebuild/ https://syndicator.net/blog/syndicator-is-a-zero-dependency-rss-aggregator-built-with-one-node-command/ The front page of syndicator.net is a river of headlines from 114 sites, newest first. Behind it there's no database, no server process and no framework. There is one command: Syndicator RSS static sites developer tools Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/syndicator-is-a-zero-dependency-rss-aggregator-built-with-one-node-command/ https://syndicator.net/blog/what-114-aggregated-sites-show-about-hugo-and-wordpress-feed-urls/ Syndicator reads 114 feeds. Every one of them is listed in a single file, feeds.json, with the site's address and its feed address. That makes it a small but clean sample of how real sites name their feeds. Here's what's in it. RSS Hugo WordPress Syndicator Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://syndicator.net/blog/what-114-aggregated-sites-show-about-hugo-and-wordpress-feed-urls/