Kaye Trammell and James Russell have noted that Blogger now has an inbuilt RSS feed – details here. Third-party RSS feeds for Blogger blogs have been pretty bad in the past, so hopefully this will be better. If you don’t know why RSS is good for you, read Kaye and Dave Winer. Let me add another reason – I (and I think many others) don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. Anyone who is running a Blogger blog should turn on this feature and display the feed link prominently.
{ 11 comments }
chun the unavoidable 01.27.04 at 7:58 pm
“I (and I think many others) don’t read blogs without RSS feeds.”
I can’t decide if this is prissy or officious.
Sigivald 01.27.04 at 8:07 pm
Neither, Chun, just a way to spend less time looking at blogs load waiting to see it there’s something new to look at.
This, mind you, coming from me, a person who has never once looked at an RSS feed.
(My real question is why won’t the CT “remember pesonal info” feature EVER work?)
kaye trammell 01.27.04 at 8:16 pm
Before I started using an RSS reader (& had RSS on my blog), I thought that the “no RSS = no read” comment was rude. Then I realized it wasn’t that at all. It’s about being practical. We are all busy people who barely have enough time to sort through e-mail. It is just difficult to a). find time to individually go to a person’s blog by sorting through 500 bookmarks and b). REMEMBER that the blog exists in the first place.
If I read one interesting post on a blog, I’ll add it to my RSS list. After that, I don’t have to remember you or how I found you … you’re delievered to me with each post. You can’t get better than that.
In the days before I used feeds, I would read about 10 blogs a week. Now I read more than 50 a day.
So, the “no RSS = no read” policy is not prissy or rude. It’s reality. If you write it for someone to read it, then make it easy.
John Smith 01.27.04 at 9:23 pm
I’m having some difficulties with the new Blogger RSS. Switching it on seems to have crashed my existing RSS (moral there, I think!), and nothing I can do gets it to work properly.
(The problem is, I surmise, non-ASCII characters: more here.)
clew 01.27.04 at 10:54 pm
Omniweb has a ‘check for changes’ function in its bookmarks that is nearly as useful and works on most websites.
Jimmy Doyle 01.27.04 at 11:08 pm
?
Anna 01.28.04 at 2:03 am
RSS question – if someone’s blog has a feed that you’ve subscribed too, and they’re sloppy thinkers/typists, and they go back 3 times to fix typos and errors of logic in a single post – will you the reader see that post 3 times in your aggregator?
Brian Weatherson 01.28.04 at 2:46 am
Anna – I don’t think this is universal, but occasionally I do have posts appear twice in my aggregator because of small changes like that. I can live with that – it’s certainly easier waiting for the HTML to load every time, or clicking on 50 different links.
Anna 01.28.04 at 4:46 am
Brian, it’s good to hear you say this, given that I am the sloppy thinker/typist.
Bryant 01.28.04 at 12:53 pm
Note that it isn’t actually an RSS feed; it’s a different type of feed known as an Atom feed that does the same thing. If anybody’s super-curious as to why there are two formats, I can get into it, but it’s awfully political.
There’s a fairly complete list of aggregators that support Atom here.
Jeff Leyser 01.28.04 at 7:51 pm
Can anyone recommend a good RSS reader for Windows? I tried Feed Demon, and it didn’t seem to work for a lot of popular Blogs. I’d like a nice 2- or 3-pane display, strong visual clue that a Blog has updated, and have a Blog’s links live within the RSS viewer. Does such a thing even exist?
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