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Tag: Web

Using Cloudflare on Your Website Could Be Blocking RSS Users via openrss.org

I have been having a few problems with some of the feeds on my feed reader during the past months. Changing the User-Agent has always fixed the error. Now, I came across this article from Open RSS.

This very likely explains all of the issues I have had across the past months. It is very sad that this is happening to such a large amount of users, and I can see that most non-tech people would not even care at all about RSS.

Personally, I also use Cloudflare and I’ve considered many times moving away from it. Unfortunately, I haven’t done that yet. I don’t know if the alternative would be to just use another DNS service, or try to find something more complete for caching purposes, such as Bunny - which I already use for the media.

Website Fidelity: Browser Perspective via blog.jim-nielsen.com

Similarly to his last article, Jim dives into the concept of website fidelity, which is a way of reducing the amount of resources a website consumes by lowering its fidelity to the original visuals and features. I quite like this idea.

Website owners aren’t necessarily incentivized to start stripping stuff out of their websites in order to support lower fidelities (including a fidelity of zero JavaScript). What you need is like an agent: somebody who works on your behalf as a user and can do for you what site owners won’t — a user agent if you will 🥁.

Note that “fidelity” in this case is not solely a control over the appearance and functionality of the website, but the actual content of the site itself. For example, at full fidelity on a news site you might have an image, title, byline, and short description for each article whereas at low fidelity you might only have the title for each.

I want to stress this point: I see the promise of website “fidelity” not just as a preference for less JavaScript and CSS but content itself. Providing users this kind of control would require website owners be involved, as I’m not sure you could do that well solely as a browser feature or extension.