MoritzK
Dan GoodinResearchers, please, please, please create RSS feeds for your blogs. We desperately need alternatives to social media to get your work out there.
shellsharks@dangoodin Yes! I found the lack of RSS feeds for people's blogs very disturbing. Way back in 2023! https://shellsharks.com/notes/2023/10/12/have-an-rss-feed
Mark Esler@shellsharks @dangoodin I have been writing mutable "notes" on my site instead of "blog posts". It lets me write (and rewrite) for myself instead of an intended audience.
Should I still use rss?
@eslerm @dangoodin I don't think you have anything to lose by enabling RSS. It lets others keep an eye on new things you post, if nothing else it serves as a mental stub. It's also easy to set up!
Quinn Comendant@dangoodin And if you use Cloudflare on your blog, please make a page rule exception for the RSS feed URL so automated tools can access it. Endpoints *meant for bots* should not use Cloudflare’s bot blocker.
Zii0@dangoodin @tchambers we also need to educate (again) people on how and why use RSS feeds I think
Simon Brooke@zii_0 @dangoodin @tchambers one thing we used to have, which were very useful but which I think we lack now, was feed aggregators – a service which combined several RSS streams into a single feed.
jonathankoren™@simon_brooke @zii_0 @dangoodin @tchambers I honestly don’t really remember a good aggregator, but i often subscribed to multiple sources that covered similar topics or even multiple feeds from a single source.
Inevitably the same article throughout the day, or on different feeds (eg general news and topic specific news), or even just had the same topic covered by multiple sources would get posted.
Even simple clustering and near dupe detection would be good here.
@dangoodin good blogging frameworks should produce RSS feeds automatically. #Cryogen does – here's mine:
Metod Rybár@dangoodin I honestly do not understand why there are any websites without an RSS feed
Jeff MacKinnonFunny enough, I just made a post on my personal site about getting lists of RSS feeds and suggesting some feed readers. Sharing free content far an wide is a solved problem with RSS. It also has the added benefit of the author continuing to OWN THEIR FUCKING COPYRIGHT, something they give up once they post it on the various corporate platforms.
I wish more people spent the time to build blogs for the content and then link to it with teasers on the corpSM.
RSS Still Wins in 2025
Its January 2025 and the internet as we knew it in 2020 is again being upended. Elmo and Muskrat are both kneeling down and working to ensure that we, as society, are not able to communicate and connect. Luckily for us, this is a problem that was solved at the …
epw@Jeff I think you're right to call out finding feeds. If your RSS reader isn't full of interesting and relevant stuff, what motivation will you have to go to it over social media?
It's taken me years to get my RSS subscriptions to cover most of what I want, and it's unending work as some feeds stop updating, and my interests shift.
You might have the right idea about sharing OPML files. Maybe I'll start trying to build one with some interesting subset and sharing it here, once a week or so.
The Doctor@dangoodin And it's irritating as hell to have to scrap their sites a few times a day to see if there are any updates.
Or scrape their socnet feeds and grep for URLs that point to their usual point-of-publication. This isn't the 90's anymore.
@dangoodin Oh, and don't forget sites hidden behind Cloudflare, which makes RSS feeds all but impossible to monitor because of the fucking CAPTCHAs.
vicash@vicash @dangoodin Fucking aargh.
Tim Le PésPeople should not forget that RSS is a cornerstone of the open, decentralized web. Platforms KILL. Keep it open!
Michael@dangoodin you've got any good recommended RSS feeds?
Martijn van Dijk@dangoodin blogs without rss baffle me. Like, how will I know there’s a new article? Shut up about your newsletter.
Slyence@dangoodin a call for RSS feeds is the kind of arcane shit I love to see on Mastodon
John Kristoff@dangoodin My blogs are pretty infrequent, but there is an index.xml by default. I rarely use an rss reader myself however. What are the recommended ways these days to make sure the feed can be discovered? Add an icon, use a standard "feed/" url, etc.
calcifer 🧯@jtk @dangoodin a link to the feed is always helpful to those starting out with feed tools, but adding the correct tag to your header helps feed readers and extensions automatically find your feed. It looks like
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="RSS Feed for my blog"
href="/rss.xml">
(Google for “RSS feed link rel” for more info)
If you do this, I can give my feed reader the URL to your blog and it will automatically find and add the RSS feed.
@calcifer @dangoodin Thanks kindly, if that is all that is needed these days then I'm already doing it thanks to #Hugo. dataplane.org/jtk/blog/ if you care to pull from it.
I was thinking of writing up some bits about an Internet sanctions paper we wrote that didn't make it into any final publication. Now I have some motivation to do so sooner than later.
John Ulrik@dangoodin And don’t forget that each Mastodon profile is also an RSS feed by default.
Rod Van Meter@dangoodin mine's available, according to my Settings, but how you can tell from looking at it, I dunno. I'm in favor of RSS but simply never got hooked on it.
https://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/
https://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/
Nick has moved to Mathstodon@rdviii @dangoodin You can feed the site URL into a tool like this to find the feed. It looks like yours is enabled. I'll add it to my feed reader later to verify. :-D https://www.rsslookup.com/
@internic @dangoodin thanks. So it's not possible for people to identify by eye that it's RSS enabled on Blogger? I suppose I should add something to the profile or something then.
@rdviii Well, i was looking on my phone earlier and didn't look all that closely, so I was giving a sort of generic answer. On Blogspot with your theme it shows a link to the RSS feed at the bottom left of the page with the text "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)". @dangoodin
@internic @dangoodin I'm on my phone and I don't see that. Will double check when I have my laptop open.
@rdviii @dangoodin Yeah, it looks like it's using some sort of responsive design to change the layout for mobile and the RSS feed link doesn't seem to appear there (unless you choose to view the desktop version).
I did manage to use the link on the desktop version to add you to my RSS reader. 🙂
Zoë Mc Pherson | SFX@dangoodin yes please
Space Hobo@dangoodin Sorry, if it doesn't have an RSS feed then it simply *isn't* a "blog". Same as with "podcasts".
Danny K@dangoodin Which RSS aggregator do you use?
NetNewsWire
Luna Lactea@dangoodin If your website or thing of any kind changes over time or receives new posts or articles in any way, it needs a RSS feed or JSON feed or Atom feed or any kind of feed you can subscribe to with a reader. So much is gated behind email newsletters & Telegram groupchats. You already have a website! Stop requiring me to have a Telegram account to see announcements! Just put a RSS feed on your website!
Alarith Uhde@dangoodin I've been planning to do this for a while and now just took half an hour to build one by hand:
https://alarithuhde.com/publications/feed.xml
This is just a list of my publications with updates whenever there is something new. #rss
Irenes (many)@dangoodin co-signed
Badri@dangoodin *closes social media to go open his RSS reader*
Tako Rojo@dangoodin Literally just helped @ocean set one up for his website recently! It was pretty neat to see that people still use RSS.
can@dangoodin Any recommendations for a good RSS reader these days?
Mark Saltveit@dangoodin
I don't understand the point of posting this without a link to a basic how-to. Ditto for evetyone who posts "you should do a blog instead of using fb/substack/ etc. for your writings."
Sure, I agree, but it's a non-trivial amount of work and everybody's busy.
I'm noticing that you, just like me, didn't leave such a link.
@dangoodin
That's true, but I wasn't telling anyone what to do either. And I don't know any links to share.
I would love to know a better platform for blogging - I use WordPress for one, obviously problematic, and hand-code HTML on the other. Kind of a pain! I would love to make an RSS feed and don't know how.
Teri Radichel@dangoodin unfortunately turning on the Medium RSS led to complete plagiarism of my blog posts and knocked them out of SEO rankings.
Dave Winer ☕️are there blogging platforms that don't automatically support RSS?
happyborg@dangoodin
Also: everyone!
Also: everyone!