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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

kevq.uk

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Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#92
post #30
post #9

I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place. I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.

I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't generally allow ads and tracking to be added.

I don't think that's it. Almost every major site has RSS, but it's usually just headlines, which I think is fine.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#93
post #58

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of the…

To address #3, provide only the title and a very brief excerpt in your feed with a link to the full monetized post.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#94
post #35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's not a Firefox thing, all RSS readers look for that. It's what allows you to paste the url from, say, a YouTube channel and the reader is able to find the feed for that channel without knowing anything about how YouTube fashions their rss urls.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bl…

Re: monetizing: Probably means you cant execute random JavaScript in an rss reader? I might be wrong on that.

At least the Vienna RSS reader (open-source for Mac), which I use, carries a full-fledged browser, and I think it displays full HTML—images and such. I'm not sure if I see any entries that execute serious Javascript, but I imagine it would work.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#96
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post.

After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, it is sad. What I don't understand is why Google didn't continue to push for RSS like they used to in ye olden times with Reader. High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost. If I was king of Googl…

In ye olden times, there wasn't Medium. Sites where everybody could write whatever they wanted. And so sites like Medium could run their own feed of sorts, and send me a digest email with what they think I want to read. The King(s) of Google do have a strong blogging community in Blogger, but it was never supposed to be, nor never will be, a backstop against Facebook. It would be better for Google to work within Face…

Back in the days there were several blog-search engines like Technorati which would use the RSS feeds from blogs to get updates quicker than Google did, because they indexed every 15 minutes and Google every couple of days.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#98

I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging. It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then. In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be…

I have heard it said that normal people don't use RSS but many power users still do.

I'm now on Netnewswire 5: https://nnw.ranchero.com/ and write a blog: http://jakeseliger.com that includes a lot of link posts. I still use RSS for all the original reasons, even if most of my friends look puzzled by the acronym "RSS." RSS still solves the "too many sites, too little time" problem extremely well, especially for occasionally updated blogs.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#99

What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder, and a few months later they discontinued support.

I'm a Feedly subscriber, but recently switched to Newsfold on Android as my reader - it's from the author of the Fenix Twitter client:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.mvilla.andr...

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#100
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"

Yeah, the user experience for this is awful. Apple News (and Safari!) both used to support RSS feeds and then they removed the feature from both.
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