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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

#211

Post by kazinator »

Sites don't offer RSS because

- they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was in its heyday and don't know what it is.

- sites operators want to human users to interact with their site specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing) in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been commoditized and aggregated.

Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself.

But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has the condensed info right there.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#213

Post by torstenvl »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #212

How do you sell an RSS feed addition to a profit-only minded manager? How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout them as they demand?

You don't sell "RSS" or any other tech speak. You sell a proven syndication technology that effectively pushes notifications to the user that there's more content on your server for them to come look at. And unlike Google News or similar syndication mechanisms, your company gets to choose what and how much content to include in the blurb/hook.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#214

Post by chrismorgan »

detaro wrote: post #115
throw0101a wrote: post #109

Are we talking about RSS specifically or a syndication feed generally (i.e., "RSS" proverbially)? Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

People use Atom and RSS almost interchangeably. Generally, it doesn't really matter which one of the two you support, nearly everything does both, I'd personally tend towards Atom. IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality, development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.

Thirteen years ago, some podcast readers coped with RSS but not Atom, but everything else coped with both just fine. Since then, I think the podcast situation improved so that everything supports Atom; but it’s very difficult to find any information at all about feeds after 2007: the problems were solved, and so no one talks about it.

Atom is technically superior to RSS, most concretely in how it specifies the format of fields like title and content, whether they’re plain text or HTML. This means that I can use things like and in my blog post titles and have it work (clients will either display the HTML unaltered, sanitise it, or strip tags, leaving the correct text), and have blog post titles with text like ::v:: (real example!) not get mangled horrifically.

I do not recommend that anything use RSS now.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#215

Post by 3xblah »

Instead of just reacting to the instantly agreeable title, out of curiousity I read the blog post and checked the blogroll the author cites as the cause for him to comment on adding RSS support.

It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn and mikebabb. Neither has much content.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#217

Post by fro0116 »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #13

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…

> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry

More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.

If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.

FWIW, there are very few companies who go to as much lengths as Mozilla to optimize for user privacy in their approach to telemetry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/testing-privacy-preserving...

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#218

Post by bscphil »

SamWhited wrote: post #11

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.

That means you too, @kevq! Please add RSS support to your site! http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#219

Post by danShumway »

sduff wrote: post #208
AndrewStephens wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not advertising on my blogs Perhaps you should, I enjoyed finding stuff like this : https://danshumway.com/blog/gamasutra-vulnerabilities/

Agree that that is an awesome article. Suggest you include the posting date on that page, as reading it, I wasn't sure how recent the info was. I was then shocked to find that these vulnerabilities were identified late last year. Some of these are security 101!

I didn't realize I wasn't attaching dates to posts, I will add those under the page headers.

This is off-topic at this point, but I still stand by the ending to that post -- Gamasutra did reach out to me and did work with me for a little while to fix some of the issues, but eventually communication fell off.

I didn't re-check to validate that the issues were fixed because I felt like I had done everything that could be expected of me at that point and because, honestly, the whole thing was really stressful. Even when companies are being nice (and UBM was really nice about the whole thing), public disclosure is still scary. You just hear horror stories.

I still recommend that people be cautious using Gamasutra. I only wrote up specific vulnerabilities that I found accidentally, I didn't pen-test the site. My point with this article was that the site needs to be pen-tested. As far as I know, that's never happened.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#220

Post by nine_k »

fro0116 wrote: post #217
AndrewStephens wrote: post #13

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…

> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored. If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways. FWIW, there are very few companies…

Web server logs, API call logs, etc don't go anywhere, though, even with 3rd party cookies and mouse movement tracking disabled.
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