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genmon / aboutfeeds

Web feeds/RSS "getting started" guide for new users.
https://aboutfeeds.com
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Mention automatic feed discovery support #4

Closed j-f1 closed 4 years ago

j-f1 commented 4 years ago

This is a little wordy and may be unclear so I’d really appreciate any help you can give for tightening it up!

At least Feedly, and probably other newsreader apps too, support scraping an HTML page to find <link> meta tags that tell them where to find an RSS feed. Even if a WordPress blog uses a theme that doesn’t have a visible link to the feed, those meta tags will often still be present and functional.

genmon commented 4 years ago

I'm reluctant to mention feed auto-discovery as it feels to me like an expert feature.

In my (informal!) testing, the experience of auto-discovery was:

  1. Go to a site that looks like it should support RSS (i.e. it has updates, it's reverse chronological, it's structured like a blog)
  2. Give the site URL to a newsreader (in this case, using the iOS Share sheet to hand it to NetNewsWire)
  3. It didn't work for the first 2 sites we checked -- and when using the Share sheet, you don't even get a "Couldn't find a feed" alert

After inspecting the source, it turned out that these 2 sites didn't support RSS. So the learnings are

  1. RSS is less well-supported than it was
  2. For a new user, the experience of trying to use auto-discovery and it failing is just baffling

I'd prefer to promote a longer but guaranteed successful path.

genmon commented 4 years ago

I've expanded this into an issue for discussion: #13