Your Most Intentional Readers
Who subscribes to an RSS feed in 2026? Who opts into a blog newsletter?
Not casual browsers. Not people who stumbled in from social media. These are people who went out of their way to hear from you directly. No algorithm surfaced your post. No recommendation engine decided it was relevant. They chose you on purpose.
That’s your highest-signal audience. And every other channel is degrading.
Social algorithms show your work to a shrinking fraction of your followers. AI is summarizing web content so people never visit the source — they ask a chatbot and get a paraphrase. A blog post on the open web is increasingly something machines read and humans skip.
RSS and email are the unmediated channels. Your words, as you wrote them, delivered to someone who asked for them. No middleman deciding what to show. No feed rank. No summary. Two direct paths between you and the people who actually care.
FolderPress now supports both.
RSS
Every site gets a feed at /feed.xml and a sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Auto-generated from published posts. No plugin, no configuration.
The temptation was to make these configurable — how many posts, which pages, custom URLs. I stopped myself. “Do I want 10 or 20 posts in my feed?” is not a question that should stand between someone and their next paragraph.
Every site includes a subscribe form. Readers confirm, then receive new posts automatically. The markdown file is both the web page and the email source. One file, two outputs. No separate email builder, no scheduling interface.
The same markdown-to-HTML pipeline renders the web page and generates the email. CSS inlined with juice because Gmail strips <style> tags. The post’s excerpt becomes preview text. It reads well from Gmail to Apple Mail.
The Hard Problem: When to Send
Emails can’t be unsent. Writers save incrementally — title first, then body, then revisions. You don’t want to email a half-written post.
The obvious solutions all push a new decision onto the writer. A manual “send” button adds a step. A frontmatter trigger (send: true) adds syntax to learn. A scheduling UI adds a dashboard to visit. All of these break the core promise: write, save, done.
The solution is a quiescence window. A post becomes eligible for email delivery only after it hasn’t been edited for 2 hours. Edit the post and the clock resets. The absence of edits is the signal of intent — if you haven’t touched it in 2 hours, you’re probably done.
A 48-hour ceiling prevents old-post edits from triggering sends. Fix a typo in something you published last week — no email goes out. Re-saving is safe; we track what’s been delivered.
The tradeoff: urgent posts have a 2-hour delay before they reach inboxes. That felt acceptable. The alternative — accidentally emailing a draft with just a title — is worse.
Why It Matters
Supporting RSS isn’t nostalgia. Building in email isn’t a Substack clone. Both are bets on the same thing: the channels where readers chose you on purpose are the ones worth investing in. Everything else is rented reach.