Just a quick one today, a more detailed blog coming soon - but I thought I'd give RSS Club Members (you!) a sneak peek.

A few months ago I saw a post on Mastodon from NLnet - they were looking for Open Source projects to apply for grant funding. The deadline was less than 24 hours away, so I rushed in an application.

There was a ping-pong of emails where I detailed more about what I planned to do, and where they kept me abreast of their timescales.

Finally, after about 6 months, I received the most delightful email confirming my place in the programme!

I'm officially part of the NGI0 Commons Fund.

So, what's the project? Regular readers will remember that I created ActivityBot as a lightweight, single-file, fully featured ActivityPub server. The grant will enable me to improve the code, test the usability, have a security audit, do some accessibility work, and make it more robust.

I'm also going to need a logo 🤖

You can read more about the project on the NLnet site.

Because this is an RSS-only post, it doesn't support comments. You can get in touch with me if you'd like to say something nice.

I'm not a big fan of the "Quantified Self" movement, but since buying a ridiculously cheap smartwatch, I've been interested to see just how many steps I take per day.

During our recent Interrail holiday, we travelled about 6,400 Km by train over 49 days. But how much did we cover by foot?

My watch pairs with the Open Source app Gadgetbridge rather than the crappy app made by the manufacturer. Sadly, Gadgetbridge doesn't have a simple way to export data in a usable format. Instead, it spews out a database dump and asks you to run SQL commands to get information out.

After a bit of swearing at the command-line, I got my daily step count. I didn't always wear my watch, but this is accurate enough for my purposes.

In seven weeks, I took 545,453 steps.

The average stride length for someone my height is around 80 cm.

So that's a total of about 436,362 metres

A marathon is about 42 Km.

No wonder I feel knackered. I think I need a holiday to recover!

I recently received an email from a distraught reader:

I was going through my recent bookmarks and I found https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/rss-club-for-wordpress which I had clearly saved to reference again later.

However, as with the nature of RSS Club™, I can't just revisit that post in my browser. I'd long since deleted the RSS item in my feed and re-adding your entire feed only fetched the last ~20 items, of which this wasn't one.

Oh no! It is true that my feed only goes back 20 entries. As a consequence, older posts are lost in the Time Vortex - much like several episodes of Doctor Who.

My first thought was "is this a bug or a feature?" Perhaps those posts should be ephemeral. It is possible that they've been archived - but it is equally possible that they've drifted away on the breeze like a child's balloon. Do I want people rummaging in the archives to get old club posts?

I think my answer is… I'm happy for them to be inaccessible for the casual reader.

But there are a few ways the determined scholar can find older posts.

Manually Save The Contents

Your feed reader probably lets you store a permanent copy of a post. You should do that if you want a local version available.

Archive.org

The Internet Archive regularly grabs a copy of my RSS feed. For example - https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/atom/

You can peruse older versions to your heart's content.

JSON API

WordPress's JSON API contains the full contents of the post (albeit in a slightly verbose JSON format). You need to know the post's ID.

For example, the JSON for this post itself can be found at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/72429

Feed Pagination

By default, you only get 20 items per feed. If you'd like to go to the 2nd page of the feed, you can use:

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/atom/?paged=2

Then ?paged=3 for the next, etc.

Category Feeds

WordPress has build-in support for category-specific feeds. So, if you want to subscribe to only the RSS Club posts, you may use https://shkspr.mobi/blog/category/rss-club/feed/

This also works with tags, for example https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/rss-club/feed/

They should both be the same, but I primarily use categories to differentiate between club and non-club posts.

Email

Feel free to email me if you can't find something. My contact details are on https://edent.tel/

My wife and I are preparing for a big Interrail journey through Europe. Whenever we go on holiday, we like to meet up with friendly locals to have a drink and chat. We did this on our last journey and it was great.

So, if you're a member of RSS club and fancy showing some tourists a cool bar, awesome restaurant (with vegan options), local tech conference, or nifty museum - please get in touch.

Our exact dates aren't finalised yet, but from now until the beginning of July, we'll be taking roughly this route:

• 🇩🇪 Hamburg →
• 🇩🇰 Copenhagen →
• 🇸🇪 Gothenburg →
• 🇳🇴 Oslo →
• 🇸🇪 Stockholm →
• 🇫🇮 Helsinki →
• 🇪🇪 Tallinn →
• 🇱🇻 Riga →
• 🇱🇹 Vilnius →
• 🇵🇱 Warsaw →
• 🇩🇪 Berlin → Munich →
• 🇮🇹 Verona → Milan →
• 🇨🇭 Basel →
• 🇫🇷 Paris

If you're in one of those cities and fancy a beer & veggie burger, please give us a shout. We won't be able to meet everyone as we do have some existing plans and tight connections but, as they say, it's nice to go where everybody knows your name.

As a little thank-you for being a member of RSS Club I thought I'd show you some trailers for upcoming blog posts.

I use the brilliant Editorial Calendar Plugin to organise all my scheduled blog posts. Here's what you can expect over the next month:

I tend to write in bursts - rather than once per day - and then spread the posts out. As I'm going on a long break soon, I want to make sure there are plenty of posts in the queue. There are also a bunch of posts scheduled over the next few years on specific dates.

Of course, if I unexpectedly die, I guess they be posthumous…

I'm also working on what will be (I hope) a reasonably big political story. I'm under embargo until my media partner publishes it - but I hope it'll go live in the early hours of Tuesday. Stay tuned 😊

If there's something you'd like to see me write about, please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very rough idea of where visitors are from.

It doesn't deal with people using a VPN, or their mobile roaming to a different country, or rapid changes in IP allocation - but it's good enough for my purposes.

Here's a quick table showing the vague distribution of RSS Club members.

There are a few more rows but, in the spirit of privacy, I've not included some of the more unique countries. Not all of those are unique views - these are aggregate statistics. If your RSS reader is hosted in a different country - or on a large platform - it may only show up inaccurately.

If you don't see your country in this list, please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

I was sent this thought-provoking blog post called "The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan)".

In it, Martin Paul Eve makes the case that trying to preserve a blog is difficult. I mostly agree with him (although think he's perhaps a little hair-shirted about it) and it made me think about what I do in terms of preservation.

This feed is captured by the Internet Archive. That's been useful on the rare occasions where my posts have been corrupted and I don't have a backup.

I got my blog an ISSN. I guess in theory this mean the British Library have a right to archive it? But I haven't looked in to whether that is the case.

I don't store my posts in a git repository. Perhaps I should?

I like the idea of WordPress's 100 year domain name but I'm not sure if I trust the current owner not to completely shit the bed. And it's hard to justify £31k on a vanity project.

I'm not a scholar, so using something like Rogue Scholar feels inappropriate. My content also isn't Creative Commons licenced (perhaps it should be?).

If you have a good solution for a long-term, stable, and relatively cheap method of preserving a blog (and its RSS feed) please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃

If you want this for your own WordPress site, here's what you'll need:

1. A blog post which is only visible in RSS / Atom.
2. Which has no HTML rendering on your site.
3. And cannot be found in your site's search.
4. Nor via search engines.
5. Also, doesn't appear on your mailing list.
6. Does not get shared or syndicated to the Fediverse.

(This is a bit more strict than the original rules which allow for web rendering and being found via a search engine.)

Start With A Category

The easiest way to do this in WordPress is via a category - not a tag.

After creating a category on your blog, click the edit link. You will see in the URl bar a tag_id.

Whenever you want to make an RSS-exclusive post, you select the category before you publish.

Disable Display

This code stops any page in the RSS Club category from being displayed on the web.

function rss_club_post_blocker(): void {
    if (    is_singular( "post" )
        &&  has_category( "rss-club" )
        && !current_user_can( "edit_posts" ) )
    {
        status_header( 403 );
        echo "You must be a member of RSS Club to view this content.";
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( "template_redirect", "rss_club_post_blocker" );

Editors can still see it, but everyone else gets a blocked message.

Remove From Site Search and SiteMap

Here's a snippet to stick in your functions.php - it removes the category from any queries unless it is for the admin pages or the RSS feeds.

//  Remove the RSS Club category from search results.
//  $query is passed by reference
function rss_club_search_filter( \WP_Query $query ): void {
    //  Ignore admin screens.
    if ( !is_admin() && !is_feed() ) {
        //  Find the RSS-Club category ID.
        $category = get_category_by_slug( "rss-club" );

        //  Remove it from the search results.
        if ( $category ) {
            $query->set( "category__not_in", [$category->term_id] );
        }       
    }
}
add_action( "pre_get_posts", "rss_club_search_filter" );

This code also redacts that category from the build-in sitemap. Note - the name of the category still shows up in the XML, but it leads to a 404.

Exclude From Email and Social Media RSS Feeds

My mailing list and social media posts are fed from RSS. So how do remove an entire category from an RSS feed?

Simple! Append ?cat=-1234 to the end!

A negative category ID will remove the category from being displayed. So my email subscribers won't see the RSS only content. Of course, they get email-only exclusive posts, so don't feel too bad for them 😊

Fediverse Exclusion

The manual way is easiest. Assuming you have the ActivityPub plugin and a the Share On Mastodon plugin, you can unselect the sharing options before publishing.

If you think you might forget to toggle those boxen, there is a filter for the share plugin:

function rss_club_mastodon_filter( bool $is_enabled, int $post_id ): bool {
    global $exclude;
    if ( has_category( $exclude, $post_id ) ) {
        return false;
    }
    return $is_enabled;
}
add_filter( "share_on_mastodon_enabled", "rss_club_mastodon_filter", 10, 2 );

Similarly, there's a filter for the ActivityPub plugin:

function rss_club_activitypub_filter( bool $disabled, \WP_Post $post ): bool 
{
    global $exclude;
    if ( has_category( $exclude, $post ) ) {
        return true;
    }

    return $disabled;
}
add_filter( "activitypub_is_post_disabled", "rss_club_activitypub_filter", 10, 2 );

Enjoy!

If you've set up your own RSS Club feed, drop me a line so I can subscribe 😊

This whole experiment is called RSS Club - but perhaps it should be called "XML-based distributed feed club"?

I've been playing about with local-only and privacy-conscious view tracking. I can see how many people click on my stories from HN or Google or anywhere else. I also decided to add the number of times a story is viewed by someone reading via feeds - like you!

Here's a typical day of page views:

First of all, I'm staggered that so many of you read this via feeds! Hurrah! And I'm amazed that I get more readers via feeds than Google. Every member of this secret RSS club is awesome 😘

When I originally set up this blog, it only supported RSS. At some point, WordPress added the more modern Atom feed format. Both get full support from me. But I'm wondering why so many people are still on RSS rather than Atom? Are there clients which don't support Atom? Is it just a legacy thing?

Should I redirect the RSS feed to the Atom feed or would that break things for you?

If you have any strong views on RSS 🆚 Atom, please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while, so I decided to make it.

This is "Scan Slowly And See".

The code is made by cloning some of the banana's spots. Do let me know if the QR code works for you 🍌

RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃

If I've done everything right⁰, this page isn't visible on the web. It can't be found by a search engine. It doesn't share to Mastodon or appear syndicated to ActivityPub.

Of course, that also means that I can't receive any comments or feedback about it. I'd love it if you dropped me a note to say you found this post. My contact details are on https://edent.tel/ - feel free to use whichever method you like.

So, what can you expect from this exclusive content? More of the same old nonsense - but probably stuff I don't want to argue about on Social Media.

As a first pass, let's talk about this "Let's write a constitution" post from Matt Ellery. In it, he discusses various fun / sensible things you could do with a written constitution. I particularly like the idea of having a "Prime Number Election".

In my modernist tweak, I'd set up something like this:

• Local council elections every 3 years.
• National MP elections every 5 years.
• Upper chamber elections every 7 years.

That ensures that no one party can dominate. Once every 35 years, the upper chamber elections would be brought forward by one year, with their next term lengthened to 8 years.

I'm less sure about having the locals be at the same time for every council. I think that could be a lot of work for democratic volunteers. Perhaps stagger them into thirds or quarters of the year?

Either way, I doubt we'll be getting a written constitution any time soon!