The new Gatsby website has been soft launched for a couple weeks now and seems to be working pretty well so far, so I’m now moving on from building out the site to building out a bunch of tools for sending out notifications of new content. My hypothesis here is that if I can make the barrier to entry as low as possible for people to get notified of new posts, they’ll be more inclined to read them, and that means going where people already are. Obviously RSS is a great technology for this, but it never really recovered from Google Reader meeting its far too early demise. People use algorithmic news apps, social networks, chat apps, and more to find and share posts, and so that’s where I need to be.

So far I’m planning on distributing posts to:

• RSS/Atom/JSON feeds
• A Twitter account
• A Telegram channel
• Medium
• Flipboard
• Apple News
• Email
• Mastodon

I’m a big believer in making a bunch of little systems that work together rather than one big monolithic system. I chose to build this project using the Serverless framework built on Amazon’s AWS technologies like Lambda. I really didn’t want to manage keeping processes alive and setting up things like cron jobs, so this makes a lot of sense. There are also a few other endpoints I want to implement later for the site like Micropub and Webmentions which would be nice to have managed through Lambda rather than running forever on some VPS somewhere.

Once it’s working, the basic pipeline looks something like this:

1. I create a post (or make some change the site) and commit it to a Git repo
2. I push the repo to my GitLab server
3. When GitLab receives a commit, it kicks off a CI job to build the site and deploy it.
4. Once deployed, it sends a message to an AWS Lambda function to signal the site has changed.
5. The function on Lambda downloads a copy of the current website data and a copy of the last seen website data from AWS DynamoDB
6. New and updated posts are sent to a WebSub server (you might remember this as “PubSubHubbub”) to signal to anyone who subscribes that the page changed. (Which means that, once this is working, the entire site will support WebSub as a server-to-server push mechanism!)
7. New posts are inserted as rows into a DynamoDB table
8. A series of AWS Lambda functions will be listening for insert events on that table, one for each service listed above, and they will farm out the API calls to each service

I like this approach because it’ll hopefully mean there is some resilience to normal maintenance things like server restarts and database failures. It fits nicely with a lot of open standards being pushed by the IndieWeb movement. And it’ll be automatically integrated into the build process, so I won’t forget to actually do the crossposting. It’s already well underway with a lot of the infrastructure in place; steps 1-5 and step 7 are all finished. All that’s left is to set up the individual integrations with each service and connect the WebSub plumbing.

Apple, who just yesterday announced a $53 billion profit in a single quarter (driven largely by the iPhone and its App Store), is shutting down the affiliate program for the App Store. Meaning blogs that cover the App Store and highlight great apps will no longer be able to get paid for driving traffic. With only 60 days notice, Apple will stop paying developers for the traffic they’re already sending and just take the money for themselves.

I don’t know how to view this as anything other than a “screw you, we got ours” move. Apple has the cash to run this program into perpetuity. With the App Store in the millions of apps, there is always room for more voices of curation, because the most valuable marketing is word-of-mouth. Developers won’t see lower rates and customers won’t see lower prices. There is no upside to anyone here except Apple, the richest company on the planet. It doesn’t make any sense.

Eli Hodapp of TouchArcade:

I don’t know how the takeaway from this move can be seen as anything other than Apple extending a massive middle finger to sites like TouchArcade, AppShopper, and many others who have spent the last decade evangelizing the App Store and iOS gaming.

Federico Viticci:

I am personally not that affected because we saw this coming years ago and we adapted – but it’s a huge blow to small publications, indie devs, and others who rely on this to earn commissions. Sad.

Daily reminder that if you truly want your favorite blog to stick around, make sure to support them directly, whitelist them for ads, buy through their podcast sponsors, etc.

Shawn King:

This has the potential to kill sites like Touch Arcade that use the revenue from App Store affiliate links to stay afloat. I think Apple’s stated reasoning for this action is utterly ridiculous and complete bullshit. But it also shows the danger for any site or business to rely too much on one source of revenue.

Greg Pierce:

The affiliate program was not huge for me, but it was a nice small check every month. I imagine this will particularly hurt small blog/news sites that do a lot of app coverage, however.