Should I make an RSS feed for my website if I don't myself read RSS feeds?

[poesu]

I've tried reading news and blogs via an RSS reader, but found out it's not my thing at all. I actually like manually going to websites and checking for updates. It kinda feels more personal. Also I don't get overwhelmed by unread updates. There're sites that I visit daily with relatively few updates, but some others I prefer visiting rarely despite them having tons of new posts every day.

But I know a lot of indie web folks who reeeeaaally push for RSS, and I do understand them. I just don't know if I should implement an idea that I don't personally believe in?

[cyanidesunrise]

i'd say yes. they're pretty trivial to generate if you're fine with generating them badly. if someone's interested in your website enough to want notifications, might as well give it to them.

i use a random rss generator i found on crates.io, it fucks up the media links but gets the text content across fine, though there's probably a much more normal option out there.

[Dan Q]

I'd hope you would. My RSS reader is the first, last, and sometimes only website I visit on a day. When I find a cool personal website I enjoy and want to revisit if it changes, an RSS feed is what I look for. If it doesn't have one... I probably never end up revisiting.

If I'm really excited by a website (and their HTML is pretty consistent) I might use XPath Scraping to create an RSS feed for it, just for me. I do this with @TYOMA !! 's updates page, for example: anything added to this page in the same consistent format as the existing content appears in my RSS reader "as if" if were an RSS feed. But this takes more work, so I have to be especially impressed to make the effort!

So yeah, I'd hope you would. And as @cyanidesunrise observes, it doesn't have to be hard!

If subscribing to RSS feeds isn't working for you, though, it might be worth looking at why. I know many people who don't like feed readers because they "feel like email": just a big number of "unreads" that you never get to the bottom of. It's a painful antipattern that I feel myself, and I take steps to fight it! If it's about losing the personality of the sites you visit, maybe there's a solution to that too.

[Adam]

Up to you, obviously, but I think it has a lot to do with how you intend for people to engage with your website.

If your intention is for people to stumble across your site, enjoy it for a few minutes, and then move on; no need for an RSS feed. My "homepage" is exactly that, for example. There's not a ton of content, so you can easily read it all in a couple minutes and be done with it. I don't expect people to come back. No RSS feed there. My blog, on the other hand, I hope that some people (even just a few) would be interested in reading more of what I write and would want to return again in the future. The blog gets an RSS feed.

Personally, I use RSS extensively. I have tons of sites bookmarked in my web browser, but I rarely remember to follow up with them; they get bookmarked and then forgotten. RSS lets me follow small blogs and personal sites without being overwhelmed spending hours checking them all individually. I also use RSS to follow forums (including this one), project updates (github), and even Reddit. Not only does it let me keep up with all those sources in a single place, but it's also far more respectful of my time than any social media platform.

[poesu]

Then that's worth a shot! Thanks everyone!

[xwindows]

First thing first: don't equate "web feed" to "RSS"; it is a family of technologies rather than a single technology.

I actually like manually going to websites and checking for updates. It kinda feels more personal.

I actually used to be in your camp, until the number of webcomics I follow exceeded dozen-- which it was starting to be exhausting for me to regularly follow them by hand daily. That was the time I started using the small Internet "follow" tool (feed reader) bundled in my browser to follow them. (Opera Classic; RIP)

Never looked back to my manually-checking days ever again.

Nowadays, even that I look through my feed reader only once a day; if I encountered new incrementally-updated works which I can't follow with my feed reader... I would find that I would start forgetting to check it, and the thing would end up completely forgotten quite quickly.

But I know a lot of indie web folks who reeeeaaally push for RSS, and I do understand them. I just don't know if I should implement an idea that I don't personally believe in?

Note that the minimal kind of web feed possible is the OG style-- giving only headings of things you have, associated URL, and associated timestamp (also UUID when the spec required); arranged reverse-chronologically, just that. No in-feed summary or in-feed content was needed (1); the feed reader would simply offer visitor to load target page, or open the page in browser when it detected such absence.

^ Note that RSS feed is also very hacky in the last aspect mentioned (2), which means...

If you hand-craft your site and feed, I do NOT recommend making it RSS feed; make it an Atom feed instead. It is not new (3) and virtually every feed readers support it. Atom is cleaner and designed to be harder for you to screw up stealthily without validator screaming at you-- which is especially important when you don't follow your own feed and only relied on validator to detect your errors.


(1) Even if you were participating in things like feedreaders' exclusives (proponents of this scheme refer to it using a misnomer "RSS club", but I won't); you don't need in-feed content-- you just make sure that such "exclusive" pages were merely unreachable from your home/index page.

(2) Because limitation+ambiguity of RSS specification and how people have been misappropriating it to this day; feed reader literally can't tell differrence between RSS feed which contains summary vs. RSS feed with actually contained "full content". The only way to avoid this confusion in RSS feed, is to write it in the OG way I just suggested (headings only, no summary, no content).

Atom feed doesn't have this problem: summary is called `<summary>` while full content is literally called `<content>`. Clear and simple.

(3) It's actually nearly 20 years old now. My first time in blogosphere was around the time back when Atom was new; time sure flies.

[poesu]

Thank you so much for help! So Atom is what I need, got it. I was just wondering how to actually put the content in the feed, yeah, I'm a lil' silly and I need to educate myself more... I'll probably get to work on it tomorrow! Much love <3