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omg rss is still around (quokk.au)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/peoplemastodon
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[–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I've done this for a club's webpage that I admin and what I found most challenging, is to describe what the fuck the user is looking at. If you just link them the RSS XML and they click on that, then the browser downloads the XML file, which isn't useful. They have to copy that link and then paste it into their feed reader.

Ah, right, what feed reader? If they don't know what RSS is, they probably don't have one installed. Do I just tell them, to download a specific feed reader app for whichever operating system they're on? Do they know what an operating system is? And do I really want to recommended feed reader apps for operating systems that I don't use myself?

Well, and finally, if I do describe all that gubbins, will anyone actually read that rather than just noping the fuck out?

So far, I have a link to the Wikipedia article on feed readers, which somewhat explains the concept and has at least a few links for the different feed readers out there. But yeah, I don't actually believe anyone is going to read that and then know what to do...

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Browsers have severely regressed in their RSS support. It used to be Firefox would preview RSS and display an easy single-click option to subscribe with your favorite reader, with suggested readers for people who don't have one yet.

    I guess websites developers have to make up for this, develop a dialog with shortcuts to subsribe with a handful of popular readers, and a shortcut to copy the link. There may already be JS libraries for this.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Ah yeah, that's unfortunate. I actually don't remember that it had a UI for RSS, just the Live Bookmarks, so I was recently thinking they could at least detect that it's an RSS XML and then show a message that the user has to put the link into their feed reader.

    But yeah, even that's easier said than done, since you also have to support Atom and JSON Feed and whatever other formats there might be, and the message has to be translated into a gazillion languages, too...

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