Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

Post by mtberatwork » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

jonahx wrote: post #161

ddrager wrote: 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…

> Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Tangent but: Does google have any official way to combat this? It seems like an easy enough problem to solve. As the content-creator, you could submit your content first to some kind of registry, so that google could identify you as the true author. Does anything like this exist? If not, why not?

Post by smush » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 12:03 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #136

smush wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/ I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon…

Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.

Post by AndrewStephens » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 12:12 PM UTC

michaelbrooks wrote: post #259

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…

Just a heads up, it's great to have an RSS feed, but readers won't automatically detect that you have one. I see you already have a link to your RSS feed so if you put this RSS That then tells all RSS readers that the link is a feed, and the reader will then detect this. Then say if I use Feedly and want to subscribe to your site, I can link to your homepage and it will automatically detect your feed. You can also us…

Post by ddrager » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #265

myfonj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Could you elaborate how you measured that? While Google trends depicts decline in search frequency so it may correlate with actual usage, it could as well mean that the "RSS market" is stable and saturated ("everybody know about it, so no need to search for it"). If you came to this conclusion while looking at your access logs, keep in mind that single request from some…

Back when RSS was a thing cloud based readers pass on the number of readers when requesting the feed. Analytics software would use this. I'd be surprised if this has completely atrophied away.

Post by ddrager » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #124

ddrager wrote: 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…

While it's true that RSS has died, I'm using it more than I ever did when Google Reader was around. Many people are using Feedbin or mobile RSS readers. I've been idly working on my own RSS reader that actually answers some of your concerns. It doesn't excerpt blogs, but just gives me an overview of what's happening out there: https://www.kickscondor.com/images/fraidycat-aug2019.jpg My problem isn't a business issue…