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!