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We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

developer.chrome.com

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Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#191

Post by lapcat »

listmaking wrote: post #185
lapcat wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions? In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken. Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important ann…

Not the GP but I think that blog post https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration you linked explains it pretty clearly? • The people working on web.dev decided to migrate to a common Google site platform, so that they could focus on content rather than maintaining an ad-hoc infrastructure, • That platform happens not to support RSS (yet), so they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, c…

> relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.

This is a false dichotomy. I wasn't questioning the decision to migrate platforms, I was questioning "the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling".

> there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.

I disagree, because whenever you migrate, some features are considered essential and others inessential. Someone consciously decided that RSS was among the inessential features in this specific case. The "culture" did not make that specific decision.

This is the developer relations team. How can you have relations with developers when they don't even see your announcements? The essential part is the communication with outside developers, not the internal CMS.

> they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.

How were developers supposed to know any of this? I had no idea until now.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#192

Post by googlryas »

culi wrote: post #165
listmaking wrote: post #153

This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team? In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone t…

when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?

I've been at Google 14 years and 2014 was around the time I noticed more and more people internally lamenting that old Google was dead.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#193

Post by Sebb767 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #189
kinlan wrote: post #133

Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul

For what it's worth, when the answers are "we are working on a solution" and "we are working on making sure this lands", to me, that is classical business speak for "we are not going to add it, but will present an alternative (that probably doesn't meet your needs the way it did)." I'm leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt in this case, but why be oblique like this? Why not say "We are working on adding RSS"…

All of these statements seem quite similar to me. Especially "we are aiming to restore RSS support" is even less committal. To me, Pauls post reads like a pretty direct promise to restore that functionality and not like business speak.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#194

Post by pc86 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #172
pc86 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably related to whatever reason the site was moved in the first place, but regardless an internal Google deadline is unlikely to be met with anything other than "so what, fix RSS first" in this thread. The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority th…

"so what, fix RSS first" seems like a valid criticism even if it really is true that this isn't something this particular person has any control over. If your organizational structure is forcing you to do something dumb, then there's a problem with your organizational structure.

Maybe - I don't think letting engineers decide all prioritization is by definition any better than having it all decided by SVPs trying to get their EVP promo or next stock bonus - but "fix Google's organizational structure" is about as helpful/useful a comment as "so what, fix RSS first."

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#195

Post by Sebb767 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #172
pc86 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably related to whatever reason the site was moved in the first place, but regardless an internal Google deadline is unlikely to be met with anything other than "so what, fix RSS first" in this thread. The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority th…

"so what, fix RSS first" seems like a valid criticism even if it really is true that this isn't something this particular person has any control over. If your organizational structure is forcing you to do something dumb, then there's a problem with your organizational structure.

Which might be true, but even harder to fix than the feature in question.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#196

Post by jrm4 »

Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#197

Post by kinlan »

happytoexplain wrote: post #189
kinlan wrote: post #133

Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul

For what it's worth, when the answers are "we are working on a solution" and "we are working on making sure this lands", to me, that is classical business speak for "we are not going to add it, but will present an alternative (that probably doesn't meet your needs the way it did)." I'm leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt in this case, but why be oblique like this? Why not say "We are working on adding RSS"…

Sorry - it was business speak, it's certainly words that we use internally, the intent was to say we are working on adding RSS back to the site.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#198

Post by al_borland »

smusamashah wrote: post #118

When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline o…

I have to wonder if it just never caught on with the mainstream as average users didn't really get it? Apple went so far as to name a release of their browser, "Safari RSS" [1]. Even with this level of focus from Apple, I never really heard anyone talk about it or start using it. Those who already used RSS had better readers, and those who didn't use RSS never really saw the value with this implementation.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/1671/9

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#199

Post by freedomben »

listmaking wrote: post #175
culi wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?

Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the fir…

Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

#200

Post by DHPersonal »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #16
reddalo wrote: post #10

People don't understand how much RSS is useful... I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.

NetNewsWire on ios+macos+icloud for sync That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.

I use that setup too, but I wish that NetNewsWire offered an image thumbnail in its story list.
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