I once wrote a long and very boring rant about RSS. It was really quite horrid, and the kind of offensive snootiness that I am normally so good at avoiding, as I despise it in others.
I never published it, for this reason.
However, some of my points were valid, so I am distilling it, allowing the vapour to condense below into small droplets of PURE FACT.
1. If your page title begins with a full stop, it makes Thunderbird scream and wail, so I can’t use your RSS feed.
2. If you use MT and your default archive type is monthly (rather than individual entry), then unless you have modified the RSS template to use MTEntryPermalink instead of MTEntryLink, then it also makes Thunderbird scream and wail.
My blogroll currently contains 12 well-formed RSS feeds, about 8 malformed ones, and 4 sites that don’t have an RSS feed whatsoever.
I have set up an account with kinja and added a few feeds. It seems to deal with both of the above cases, and also sites with no RSS feed. Would it be craziness if I didn’t switch?
January 25, 2005
aRSeS
How does it handle Atom?
It supports Atom, and I ran a short trial with your feed which didn’t crash spectacularly. That said, I’d imagine that the two major bugs that I mentioned above are still present, as they seem to be a question of implementation.
The big “plus” for kinja, in my opinion, is basically that it is a web-based application, so bugs will be continually fixed and updates continally implemented. Thunderbird seems to have a slow release cycle, and (admittedly non-critical) bugs hang around for a long time.
You thought about bloglines? Quite a few of my mates use that and are pretty happy with that? i use website watcher, which isn’t strickly a RSS reader, but servs my purpose much better.
Feedburner will help for those with ‘dodgy’ feeds.
And I’d humbly suggest the Sage extension for Firefox. Which everyone is using, right?
And I’d forgotten about Kinja!
Gordon, your blog doesn’t seem to talk to my kinja thingy. Don’t know if this is something you can fix…
I have to say that RSS feeds is probably the one thing that Pete ever talks about that I actively don’t listen to.
I feel like a luddite, because I still have a list of URLs that I click through, visiting each site in turn.
I work in new media.
Something’s not right, is it?
No, Vaughan, I do the same. I’ve even installed an RSS reader on FireFox, and STILL don’t use the bloody thing.
Techno-Neanderthal, that’s me.
I know that some people look at d4d™ through Kinja, but I’ve absolutely no idea whether anyone else looks at it through an RSS reader. WP provides ’em, I provide ’em, I just don’t use ’em.
Simple as that. 😀
Oh, and Pete, I’ve no idea if my site is one of those that does or doesn’t feed properly. I suspect it does (or perhaps did ’til this week’s farce with WP) so hope it does, but tough if it doesn’t. Use Kinja. :
Ah. Point number 1. That’ll be me then. I wonder if padding it with a space would help.
But I don’t approve of you using RSS anyway. I want you to marvel at the splendid design several times each day. Yes.
And Pete thought he had been so discreet, in not naming any names…