Mastodawn

Bloggers and newsletter peeps, I beg you, make your RSS feeds *easier* to find by having them be links on your website, especially on mobile. I am a lazy person, so having to hit share, and then my RSS reader app is sometimes a lot of work VS just double tapping on an RSS link. Also, sometimes, my RSS reader can't find your RSS feed. I *want* to follow you, but not by email. I use email for communication. #RSS #WebDev #Newsletter

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FediThing

Feb 25

@WeirdWriter

I'm not sure why, but there are so many websites now that still have RSS feeds but no longer show links to them.

It used to be so common to link to your site's RSS, I wonder why they disappeared? Is it people trying to drive their socials follower numbers up by hiding other options?

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brib [has moved again]Feb 25

@FediThing @WeirdWriter Sometimes RSS readers (Vivaldi, Akregator) pick up the feed automatically via the Meta tag. I used to spend ages hunting down the feed then I realise you can often post the page URL into the RSS reader and then the feed gets auto-located.

Sometimes RSS feeds have XML errors so it doesn't always work but it's worth a try if you can't find a link

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Robert Kingett Feb 25

@sitcom_nemesis @FediThing This has been my experience as of late, the reader just can't find the feed, probably because of an XML error.

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brib [has moved again]

@WeirdWriter @FediThing Ach, that's annoying. I know sometimes Akregator says it can't find the feed but manages to find the feed URL, and then when you paste in the feed URL it downloads fine. But I don't know why exactly it does that and I don't know how well that generalises. Maybe it's something to do with the RSS parser itself being more forgiving than the XML parser.

If you're comfortable with digging into document sources and your RSS reader has a similar quirk, you might have luck looking for the <link rel="alternate" href="example.com/your-feed.xml" type="application/rss+xml"> tag in the blog