Arguably two of the biggest problems in the web design industry today are the environmental impact of our online activities and the harvesting and misuse of our personal data. In reality, these two issues are directly linked. The tracking and storing of data requires a massive amount of infrastructure and energy. If we can reduce the number of tracking scripts on the web, we can not only be more responsible when it comes to data privacy, we can directly reduce the environmental impact of our online activities. In this article, well look at some of the most invasive trackers being used almost as standard across business websites, explore some of the more ethical alternatives, and ask whether we can still make insights-based decisions without harvesting personal data& The use of tracking scripts is now so widespread that it has been described as endemic. Aside from the ethics of these practices, the problem from a sustainable web design perspective is how much these scripts slow a website down, and how much more carbon they produce. Each tracker is a file that sits in the shadows of a site and requires loading with the page. Even those do you want to accept cookies notifications that pop up need to load extra files to work, adding to the weight of web pages and generating more emissions in the process. Trying to browse the internet without having to cede your personal data to the highest bidder has become a real challenge. Even the smallest of business websites now seems to have cookie popups simultaneously telling us they value your privacy while harvesting data about who we are, where we are, what were looking for and what we were doing online before we landed there. Tracking scripts have become so pervasive that they have effectively become an industry standard, and most businesses deploy them not only without question, but without consideration of what it means for customer privacy. For years, companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have been dishing out free software for people to use on their websites. These third-party scripts have provided website owners with a host of amazing functionality, ranging from analytics to video embeds and maps, often with the addition of only a single line of code. But these business behemoths arent charities, and their free tools have come at a price: consumer privacy. Not only do many of these tracking scripts pass user data back to the third-party company that provided it, they pass it on to any other partner they are in cahoots with. Some of the most common web trackers include: Theres no doubting that website analytics are a useful business tool. They let you measure traffic to your website and identify how people are engaging with your content, and this can help you make improvements to your both your website and your marketing. Here at Root, as an eco-friendly web design agency, we believe one of the best ways of reducing the carbon impact of a website is by implementing a considerate content strategy that prioritises quality over quantity. Analytics are key to this, because it means businesses can be more purposeful about their content. They can get rid of the content that gets no views, better target more useful questions, and bring down the overall size and emissions of their site. But analysing your website traffic doesnt need to come at the expense of your visitors privacy. These ethical alternatives will give you all the insights you need to make informed improvements: Learn more about privacy-focussed software at Below Radar. The first step in being able to protect your users data and reduce your websites carbon emissions is knowing what tracking scripts you are using and where. These tools provide a useful starting point for making improvements. Read more about Tools for calculating your websites CO2 emissions. Here at Root, we believe there needs to be a shift in both the collective mindset and the accepted industry standard for tracking everything we can, just in case it comes in handy one day. As smaller, ethical businesses, we have a golden opportunity to do things differently and set the tone for a more privacy-focussed future; one thats not only better for our customers, but better for society, better for the planet, and better for businesses. When youre considering whether to install any piece of tracking software, ask yourself these questions: If the answer to any of these questions is no, perhaps theres no need to install a tracker. Consumer trust is arguably as important to a business as the products they sell or the services they deliver, yet few businesses give consideration to how they collect, use and share their customers online data. The use of unethical, energy-guzzling tracking scripts have become all-pervasive, and we need a shift in thinking that begins to prioritise people, privacy and the planet. In this article, weve spoken about how we can be more thoughtful about the data we collect and how, in doing so, we can better protect our customers and the environment. Weve looked at how:
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404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feed
Since we launched 404 Media in August, the most common request we’ve gotten from our subscribers is for an RSS feed that contains the full text of all of our articles. We are proud and excited to announce that today, we have finally figured out how to make this available to all of our paid subscribers. If you’re already a subscriber, you can find your feed here. If you want to become a subscriber, you can subscribe here.
Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.
We feel strongly that offering full text RSS is the right thing to do, and that offering RSS in this way can help small, journalist-owned publications like ours better connect with our subscribers and can offer another path forward as we attempt to reach our reader directly, without having to rely exclusively on Google’s declining search engine or fractured social media algorithms that consistently devalue outbound links. We believe that this is the first time that custom, paid full-text RSS feeds have been offered on a site using the Ghost CMS. This is the CMS we use, and we are proud that our site is leading the way for other Ghost-based publishers to now also offer RSS feeds if they wish. With the hard development work now done, FeedPress and Outpost can now offer the feeds as a service to more Ghost sites.
Why RSS?
Our friends Anil Dash and Ernie Smith have recently written passionately and persuasively about the importance of RSS to the open web, and about how a technology that turns 25 years old this month remains both subversive and quite versatile. RSS-based distribution underpins a podcasting ecosystem that has allowed for shows to be distributed not just on Apple Podcasts but on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and whatever other podcast player you might want to listen on. “Being able to say, ‘wherever you get your podcasts’ is a radical statement,” Dash wrote. “Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.”
Crucially, a few different companies have figured out how to offer custom RSS for premium (paid) podcast feeds. This means any given show can have a normal, ad-supported feed for the general public, but can also have a feed that features ad-free content, bonus episodes, and bonus segments using a separate RSS feed for paid subscribers.
Actually, the premium RSS feeds for podcasts aren’t usually just a single RSS feed for all of a show’s subscribers. They are individualized, custom RSS feeds that have identical content but have a unique URL for each individual paid subscriber. If a show has five paid subscribers, there will be five identical feeds with five different URLs. If it has 5,000 subscribers, there will be 5,000 identical feeds with 5,000 different URLs. By creating these unique feeds, podcasters can do member management. If someone unsubscribes, their individual feed will be turned off. If a subscriber takes their secret feed URL and posts it to Reddit or shares it with dozens of people (thereby making it not secret and giving away content that is supposed to be behind a paywall), that feed can similarly be disabled.
This is a system that works pretty well in the podcasting world, and has been done by a few different news websites, but is not widely utilized with written content. On Tedium, Smith explained that RSS has empowered podcasters, but that it needs a “creator economy rethink” for text.
We think, and hope, that a similar custom feed solution can strike the correct balance between making our work easy to access and read using whatever RSS reader you want without destroying the subscriber-funded business model that we are using and believe in, and which is fundamental to us being able to continue our journalism.
What Happened When We Asked for Your Email Addresses
In January, we published an article explaining why we decided to put up an email “freewall” on all of our posts, meaning we now require an email registration to read the site. The wall was created for a few reasons. Low-effort AI scrapers were taking our articles and automatically posting them with various errors on content farm websites. But we also explained that, in part because of AI spam, a Google algorithm that seemed to be getting worse, and the fracturing of social media, we feared a future where we wouldn’t be able to reach our readers directly.
The email wall has generally been very beneficial for us as a website and as a business. We have been able to get more free email subscribers, and a notable portion of those free email subscribers have valued our work enough to become paid subscribers. For the most part, it has had its intended effect. But the email wall has also broken other things. The wall has essentially broken the site’s RSS functionality, because RSS readers cannot see past the wall. This means that we unintentionally made our product worse for people who are paying us money. So we sought to fix this.
A Path Forward
We knew that RSS couldn’t see past our paywall soon after we launched the site. Until we turned the email wall on, however, this wasn’t much of a problem because almost all of our articles were not walled. After the wall went on, people using RSS could only read the first few lines of our articles.
As far as we know, there were no existing integrations or plugins for Ghost, the content management system and site infrastructure we use, that can create a full-text RSS feed of a Ghost website (it is possible that it’s been done, but we searched far and wide in the Ghost Forums, asked some friends, and asked other people running Ghost sites, and no one was aware of any solutions). We saw one Ghost site that managed to make a single RSS feed of its paid content, but that feed got leaked, making it possible for anyone who had the link to bypass the paywall. Disabling that link would then break the feed for any paid readers who were using it.
We reached out to a few services that do paid podcast RSS feeds to see if they would be able to develop a solution for us, but no one we asked had time to do it.
Then we found FeedPress. FeedPress was able to take an API used by Ghost to create a single fulltext RSS feed, then was able to create the individualized feeds we needed as well. Outpost was then able to sync these feeds with Ghost’s membership API, meaning that each paid subscriber is assigned a custom feed. We are grateful to both companies for working with us to develop this so that we can provide it to our readers. Both FeedPress and Outpost have said they plan to offer this service to other Ghost publishers moving forward.
The fulltext RSS feed is a feature for paid subscribers only, because we had to pay for the development of this solution, and it will also cost us money every month to keep the feeds up and running.
We have tested the feed a fair bit and believe it should work well. But there may be some bumps in the road, so please let us know if you find anything broken or if your feed isn’t working for you for some reason. We were only able to afford the development work on this project because of our paid subscribers, and are proud that we’ve been able to take your membership fees and reinvest them into the company to make your member benefits better.
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