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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

kevq.uk

31–40 of 305 posts

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#31

Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should feel bad if you're using) finally added RSS feeds, but I still have to try and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.

Medium has RSS feeds for pretty much everything, from users to tags to publications, to tags in a publications, to stories clapped on by a given user....

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#32
post #5

I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.

If the site is ad supported I can see why they're doing it. Can't serve ads in the RSS feed (some RSS readers reserve that right for themselves).

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#33
post #24

> But I was surprised to learn that many of the blogs that Jan had linked to didn't support RSS. I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from the home URL. Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no refer…

I think he doesn't know how the automatic discovery of RSS feeds works, and just looks for a visual link to one.

Like you said, he missed a lot of them, and isn't linking to his own feed properly on his site so that RSS readers can find it (with rel="alternate" and/or type="application/rss+xml").

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like he added a link to his RSS ( https://kevq.uk/feed ) at the end of the article, but like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.

It's because he doesn't have one of the rel="alternate" tags that RSS readers look for: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting... (not sure why this MDN page is marked as "obsolete").

Maybe because mozilla removed built in rss support from firefox?

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#36

RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#37

RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

RSS isn't dead.

Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources. Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw, is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp.

And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too.

Some blogs choose not to expose RSS feeds of course, but they do so at their own loss. This is because some people are not interested in expanding their audience, they just want to publish some stuff from time to time. And that's totally fine.

> Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

An RSS feed can include just summaries that redirect users to your website. And I actually prefer summaries because I don't want to mess with CSS stuff.

Of course you can monetize it, from where did you get the impression that you can't?

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#38
post #26

Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS. They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not available on Apple News"

They were just trying to make it user friendly because they know everyone really wants to go to Apple News instead.

/s

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#39
post #26

Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS. They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not available on Apple News"

iOS these days has a major problem of allowing webpages to redirect automatically to the app or worse, to the App Store.

Every now and again I have to fight Amazon to let me open a link in Safari instead of the Amazon app. Generally it's because I cannot purchase the item inside of the app (digital content like movies and Kindle books), but they still automatically open the app and make me do a dance to get it in Safari. Same thing with Yelp, under no circumstances am I ever able to get a Yelp link to open on their website. YouTube does the same thing, and I've had Gmail do it a few times too.

It's one thing to show a banner at the top letting me know you have an app. But I never want to be directed from Safari into an app. If I wanted to use the app, I'd have opened the app. Since I'm in Safari, it means I want to use the web site.

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