|
In
January of 2023 I finally added an
RSS Feed to this website. I'd also never followed
other feeds before either. I have
since discontinued my Feed (see
Final Note), but this page might
still prove useful to others.
|
What is RSS?
 "RSS
... is a web feed that allows
users and applications to access
updates to websites in a
standardized, computer-readable
format. Subscribing to RSS feeds
can allow a user to keep track
of many different websites in a
single news aggregator, which
constantly monitor sites for new
content, removing the need for
the user to manually check them.
News aggregators (or "RSS
readers") can be built into a
browser, installed on a desktop
computer, or installed on a
mobile device.
Websites usually use RSS feeds
to publish frequently updated
information, such as blog
entries, news headlines,
episodes of audio and video
series, or for distributing
podcasts. An RSS document ...
includes full or summarized
text, and metadata, like
publishing date and author's
name. RSS formats are specified
using a generic XML file.
Although RSS formats have
evolved from as early as March
1999, it was between 2005 and
2006 when RSS gained widespread
use..." -
Wikipedia |
First,
to the Feed reader.
For this
I chose
Mozilla Thunderbird. This is not
a dedicated RSS reader but it has
that as one of its functions so I
went with it.
|
A problem with
Mozilla Thunderbird that I
encountered was that I couldn't
add any feeds that were .xml
rather than .rss (I considered
feed.rss to be common, but
anything.rss or anything.xml are
also plausible since xml is the
formatting used by RSS feeds.
Thunderbird
reported: "The Feed URL could
not be found. Please check the
name and try again." whenever
the feed ended in .xml
This turned out to
be a limitation with my old
version of Thunderbird (45.4). I
upgraded to 102.7 and all was
well; somewhere between these
two versions the problem was
resolved. |
Some
things about Thunderbird I don't
like and tips to improve it:
-
I don't
like Dark Mode so I changed
this in Tools > Add-ons and Themes.
-
Sadly
there is a distinct lack of
additional themes from the
creative community because, from
what I can gather, all of the
earlier ones (many of which look
great in the preview) will not work
(or are broken) for current versions
of Thunderbird.
-
There is
no General Feed that brings together
all of the updates across the feeds
I follow, rather I have to click
through each one in the list to see
what's new there.
-
Disable
the default Start Page in Settings
to help avoid being prompted to donate
[although a Tab pertaining to this
tends to appear every once in a
while, but this isn't too bad].
Reasons for a Feed and where to host
it:
Since
using
Neocities to host my website,
I've enjoyed using the general
web-based Feed on that site to
follow other sites there, and have
other people follow me. However, I
considered what might happen if the
service stops or my site is removed.
For
these reasons it seems beneficial to
not rely solely on Neocities and to
encourage others also to not put all
their eggs in one basket. My website
is additionally hosted elsewhere, as
was my RSS feed.
See
also: Create a
Website Mirror
Creating my own Feed.
To begin
with I used
RSSBuilder to create my initial
feed.rss file saved in the root
directory of my website. This I could also
edit manually with Notepad. If I
made a mistake with Notepad then I
might find Thunderbird fails to
bring in my Feed so a good way to
check my Feed file works is to open
it in RSSBuilder. You might want to
just stick
to using RSSBuilder but I think it's
handy to see what's going on in the
file itself.
Another
thing I did was to back-date some
entries.
Note: Editing
entries at a later day appears to
generally result in duplicates in
Thunderbird.
Good
Practices?
I'm not
sure what is considered to be
'good practice' regarding
maintaining Feeds. For example,
should you eventually start deleting
older entries? I found the following
on
Wikipedia:
|
"Although the number of items in
an RSS channel is theoretically
unlimited, some news aggregators
do not support RSS files larger
than 150KB." |
Final Note:
My
RSS Feed was short-lived; but
why?
-
I
decided maintaining the rss
file was just a little too
much extra work beyond getting
actual updates out.
-
I
prefer the interaction that
goes with creating and
updating a page on Neocities
where likes and comments are
received; these are little
bits of feedback and
acknowledgement that you wont
get through the RSS Feed
system (unless you perhaps
have some dedicated followers
there who might reach out to
you directly).
I
also no longer follow sites
via RSS, but instead either
use Neocities, or create my
own little list of other sites
outside of Neocities that I
like to check in on from time
to time.
These are just my experiences
of RSS, but if you want to use
the system yourself, then why
not check out
Skep's site:
rss-list.neocities.org
where you can submit your site
to the directory, or check out
other sites there.
|
