Features / Feeds
Most platforms treat RSS as a checkbox they remember to ship and never think about again. I think that's wrong. A blog without good feeds isn't really part of the small web — it's a silo with a permalink. So every Pen to Kami blog gets the full set, kept current, auto-discoverable, with a /follow page so even readers who've never used RSS can subscribe in one click.
Every blog gets all three feed formats, generated and kept current as you publish. RSS 2.0 for the classic readers, Atom 1.0 for the strict ones, JSON Feed 1.1 for the new wave. You don't pick — readers do, and whichever they prefer just works.
Every public page on your blog declares its feeds in the HTML head. Paste your blog URL into NetNewsWire, Reeder, Feedly, Inoreader, or any halfway-decent reader and it finds the feed without you having to copy-paste a URL. The way it was always supposed to work.
Every tag gets its own feed in all three formats. A reader who only cares about your photography posts can subscribe to just that tag and ignore the rest. Useful when one blog covers a lot of ground.
Export your blogs as OPML so readers can subscribe to all of them at once. There's also a per-blog OPML for the cases where someone wants a structured list of just one blog's feeds. Standard format, works in every reader that supports OPML — which is essentially all of them.
Pen to Kami announces new posts to WebSub-compatible readers the moment you publish, so subscribers see your post seconds later instead of waiting for the next polling cycle. Slow readers still poll the feed normally; fast readers get the push. Either way you don't configure anything.
Each blog has a dedicated page that lists every way to follow it — RSS, Atom, JSON, Mastodon, anywhere else you've plugged in. Readers who don't already know what RSS is get a one-click way to subscribe in their reader of choice. No more "how do I follow this?" guessing.
/rss.xml and /atom.xml — the URLs people remember from a decade ago — redirect to your real feeds. So when someone tries the old conventional path on instinct, it just works.
Your feed isn't a tracking beacon. There's no per-subscriber pixel, no UTM rewriting, no read-receipt counting. The whole point of RSS is that it's a quiet, durable stream that doesn't spy on the people reading it. That's preserved here.