4 ms·
A tip for those who love RSS but bemoan the slow death it's suffering. Sometimes it helps to simply send an e-mail to the owner of the website and thell them th
by FriedrichN 6y ago
A tip for those who love RSS but bemoan the slow death it's suffering. Sometimes it helps to simply send an e-mail to the owner of the website and thell them their RSS feed is broken or missing. I've done that and succeeded three times so far.
Sometimes they break the feed because they changed something but didn't bother to check if it affected their feed. This of course won't be of any effect to the big SV type companies, but it might with your local newspaper, municipality website, favourite blog, etc. Doesn't hurt to try.
- eisa01 6y agoAgree, some times they even have a feed that is just not exposed!
- toyg 6y agoA massive amount of websites built on wordpress have feeds that the owners themselves don't know about.
- sneak 6y agoI get a few emails a year, every year, asking why I don't have an RSS feed on my blog. I totally have RSS on my blog, and have for every blog I've had for 20 years. It even has the appropriate HTML headers pointing to /feed.xml, so you can just pop the bare website URL into a feed reader and it will find it.
- naravara 6y agoThe main impediment I have had are magazines I subscribe to who are behind paywalls. Ars Technica and Talking Points Memo have a subscriber feed, but it's basically just an honor system thing for you to not go sharing it but they're the only ones. I'd honestly be okay if they just gave you a stub and had you click through, but they seem resistant to doing even that.
- SecurityLagoon 6y agoIt's pretty basic to implement some kind of token scheme for the feed to bypass the paywall. It happens all the time for paid podcast feeds. If you see large numbers of geographically dispersed feeds you can then look up who shared their key and have a word... Skeptically I belive most sites just don't want to supply RSS/atom feeds as it bypasses their ability to track and advertise to you and having something like needing to deal with auth is a convenient excuse.
- freedomben 6y agoI maintain a blog site for a rather popular writer, and if something breaks our RSS feed there are some die-hards that will definitely write in to let us know :-) It's worthwhile, because every time it happens it reinforces to us that having that feature is mandatory for keeping our paying users happy.