Monday April 14, 2025; 11:11 AM EDT
- Dave elaborates on what he means by inbound RSS. In my experience micro.blog is the only site that enables this in a couple of different ways. You can either have items from inbound RSS feeds appear in your timeline or to import posts from a feed to your blog. The import is intended to be a one time activity and not something that happens in an ongoing manner, so it doesn't meet Dave's use case.#
- In a roundabout way I have been using inbound RSS for some time by using If This Then That. Posts that I publish to my main blog get cross-posted to a Wordpress site, which I created back in 2008 as a replacement to the blog I first created using EditThisPage. The IFTTT applet monitors the RSS feed of my blog and when it finds a new entry it posts that to my Wordpress site. #
- Here is an example. At the bottom of the post you see the source citation, "from Routine Revelations" along with the link to the source. A problem I had when I set this up is that Wordpress requires titles for all blog posts whereas my main blog doesn't require titles, such as was the case with the source post to above example. The work around is to automatically create a title using the date and time as a unique identifier.#
- When I first started using IFTTT I had applets monitoring my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts and also cross posting this to the Wordpress site. My idea is that the site would be an archive of all of my posts across all these sites. Here is an example from Facebook. and here is an example from Twitter. If you look at the archive page from September 2020 you see a mix of blog posts and tweets and you even see some articles I favorited and shared from Pocket. Over time the social media accounts disabled the API that IFTTT to block this functionality and thus I lost this functionality. Now that Bluesky provides outbound RSS I could set up IFTTT monitoring of it but in practice I only cross post to Bluesky from my main blog, so monitoring Bluesky would be redundant. #
- My point is that a practical use case for inbound and outbound RSS is the consolidation and archival of one's Internet posts across multiple source locations.#