I always get a bit sad when a nice website, full of good writing, doesn’t have an RSS feed.
“This is great. Too bad I’ll never read any of it ever again.”
@baldur Are these usually websites, hand-rolled HTML pages and the like, or sites using blog systems that have disabled/hidden the RSS feed?
I know for the former, there at least used to be a bunch of tools available that would automate creating and updating a RSS feed from additions to a website, but even without those tools, it’s not very difficult to update a feed manually (the Camino blog was just HTML like the rest of our website, inside a very small php wrapper that added the header and footer code, so every time we made a new blog post, we updated the RSS feed manually).
@smokey I think most of the ones I encounter are the latter: blog systems with custom templates where either RSS feeds haven't been enabled (some 'modern' static site generators and CMSes don't have RSS support out of the box or don't enable it by default) or where links to the feed aren't included in the custom-built template so they're hard/impossible to find. Ignorance is the likeliest culprit, I think, not laziness.
@baldur I guess that’s better than laziness or outright hostility. I don’t understand why SSGs and CMSes would not include/enable RSS support, though (at least ones that are intended for blog-like/writing-focused sites)…
@baldur @smokey Because my site isn’t organized as a blog, I don’t have any way of automatically generating a feed. I’ve been thinking for some time that I ought to hand-roll one but I’ve been prevented from doing that by inertia. I find XML offputting, so I’ve been asking myself if I can get away with just providing a JSON feed. That’s better than nothing, right?
@artkavanagh JSON feed, for most purposes, is as good as an old-fashioned XML feed. Most of the major feed clients support it now. So, it isn't just better than nothing, it's practically as good as the old thing. 🙂
@baldur Thanks for that. Now, I’ve no longer any excuse, so I’ll see what I can do over the weekend.