161–170 of 197 posts
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In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar. Easy enough for power users.
That seems like it's the best option, actually. For power-users, a 3rd-party built extension is more likely to be updated / have the options you want than the button built into every version of the browser.
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Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter tracking your reading behavior.
So run NoScript. Run in private mode. Block their cookies. Block their address in your hosts file. You can use wget, curl, or any other cookieless downloading tools, none of which will expose you reading The Times to Facebook. RSS doesn't even prevent against this; it can be behind a login, it can require cookies or not serve up info, and it can send info to Facebook denoting you viewed article X. All of which is det…
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Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.
In fact, the article is on a site without any visible RSS feed available itself. You have to read the HTML source and manually parse out the rss feed. And then the author complains that it's hard to use and people aren't taking advantage of it. Jerk.
In fact, I'd bet that part of the reason many people don't use the address bar feed button is because the practice of having links to feeds is so common, and anything on the page is automatically more obvious than something out in the browser chrome.
RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
Ha! Summed up exactly what I was thinking. Difficulty reading "100 sites several times a day" isn't a technology problem; it's a focus problem.
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> Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters. My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then fin…
I know the rss reader fever (by Shaun Inman) tries to do something like this.
I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS. And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button. The worse statement in…
anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button
I think you miss the author's main point which is that the usage of the button is low not because users don't want that feature but because the UI is crappy all around. Removing the button only makes the UI worse.
RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds) i've developed…
If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You may not believe me yet, but I can wait.
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"It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance." RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem. A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all simila…
RSS is strictly linear, largely chronological. The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how important something is other than h1’s. How do we replicate the 144pt super-important headings while removing presentation from content? The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html elem…
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i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine. And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS. What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts…