Interesting - FeedBurner is closing, so I am moving away from RSS to a Newsletter.
@AlanRalph appreciate that it isn’t the same - my point is that Solis has elected to get the feedburner feed subscribers to sign up to a newsletter rather than providing a non feedburner RSS feed.
@JohnPhilpin A terrible idea! RSS feeds show up right where I want to read them—in my feed reader. Email newsletters show up mixed in with my email, then sit unread in my inbox until I finally delete all the stuff I never got to.
@JohnPhilpin RSS is much better. It is a pull system, and I control where and when the message enters my life—and I maintain anonymity.
Email newsletters are invasive, requiring personal information. This is—at a minimum—email address, but often extends to full name & beyond
@JohnPhilpin Oh good grief! He’s running a WordPress site with feeds coming out its ears. Absolutely no reason to direct feed subscribers to a newsletter instead (and with a graphic that says "Please subscribe to the new feed"—emphasis added—at that) unless you’re out to collect personal data. (It’s fine to offer email newsletters as an option to people who don’t use feeds, but to force people currently using a feed to switch to a newsletter when other feeds already exist…boggles.)
But, then again, I never understood why people used FeedBurner instead of their blogs’ native feeds in the first place…. // @AlanRalph @philipbrewer @desparoz
@AlanRalph Because it’s just not discussed outside a circle of the tech-savvy and the old skool bloggers. I really think we need to get a concerted effort out there again to let people know about RSS and feed readers.
@adders Whenever I see an interesting blog without a feed I try to get a note to the person behind it (usually, ironically, through their Twitter account) pointing out that they don't seem to have an RSS feed and asking, "What's up with that?" Results vary. Some people point me to their feed (their site just lacked metadata for the feed link). Other people quickly turn on a feed. Other people say "We'll look into that." (And sometimes end up adding a feed weeks or months later and sometimes don't.) A couple of times I've been able to provide technical support for turning on the feed or the feed metadata. Many just ignore me.
@adders There is a whole generation or two of people that have never used a RSS reader. I think you are right, we really need to start educating everyone to try one.
@smokey am I right in thinking that feedbin allows you to subscribe to newsletters and brings the newsletter right into the feed?
@JohnPhilpin Yep: Subscribe to Email Newsletters in Feedbin. This includes an anonymised email address, fully three years before Apple made it trendy. // @smokey @philipbrewer @desparoz
@simonwoods got it - thankyou - though I think the extra three years was to allow many different annonimised email addresses - not just one.
I think I will move off feedly to feedbin when my feedly sub expires - or should I just do it?
@AlanRalph People do strange things for strange reasons, I guess 🤷♂️ Although blogs that seemingly have gone out of their way to disable their feeds take the cake.
@JohnPhilpin Feedbin is quite opinionated so if you have a strong feeling about it I would say just go for it; act on the feeling in the moment and you're more likely to find exactly what you might like most about the alternative.
@jmreekes It's one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to getting Feedbin back. Especially now that there's an official app on iOS, which means I can definitely do much more of my web reading on the iPad.
@simonwoods I should use that feature. The official Feedbin app is nice, but I’m still using Unread as my client of choice. Been a huge fan of Unread since day 1