When RSS first hit the ‘net, it didn’t mean much to me; it wouldn’t until the sites I checked a few times a day started to support it. Now a days, I’ve gotten to the point where I expect a site to have an RSS feed available. Not so much for product sites, i.e. BMW or the like, but if it’s a “dynamic” site like a blog or a news site or even a forums site, I expect there to be support for it.

Yeah, there’s a point coming…

For most, if a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed available, their bookmark is deleted and life goes on. Me? I keep a very, very short list of sites that I check from time to time. At one point it was every day; now it’s once every week or two. For one site, that’s OK: he updates his site like once a month anyway, so I can live with that.

Another site – Hi Sasori-chan! – is from Diaryland. I haven’t figured out Diaryland technologically yet. It’s been around for years and I’m under the impression that it’s a single person project. I mean they got ads and stuff and all, but it seems to just chug along at it’s own pace… one thing that is shocking to me is that there are no RSS feeds for any Diaryland hosted site. A while back – like over a year ago – I pinged YongFook and SushiCam about their blogs, and whether or not they had RSS feeds; they both created their own blogging system so they hadn’t added a feed page, yet. Having said that, they both opted to add one – after all, if you’re already publishing pages, adding a new page in XML is an easy thing. For Diaryland members, it’s not that simple: they are interested in posting content and couldn’t give a crap about HTML or XML… and given the format of Diaryland, I don’t think they can add their own templates, even if they wanted to.

[Update: There is an RSS feed for Diaryland pages! Off the root of any Diaryland blog, the RSS feed is /index.rss – yay!]

Zannah has a couple of different blogs active at once; her Flickr photo stream gets an RSS feed by default, but her other sites don’t have one. But, like Kim, she’s cute enough to forgive the lack of RSS support.

Then there’s The Usual Suspects, and I have to say, it confuses me most of all. They’ve been around since 2001 and they have a strong user base. They’ve also got some interesting content. They’ve basically a public blog: a forum that any member can post an item to and then that post becomes open to comments. Much like LGF or MoDaCo are to politics and the mobile community, respectively. I hadn’t been over there for a while so I dropped them a line to see what was available. Do not do this same thing on your own! I got back a short and pointed email telling me that TUS “is a discussion board and it wouldn’t make sense to have an RSS feed.” Um, well, given that there’s a bunch of sites in the same format that offer an RSS feed, it must make sense to someone… including me! So I responded as such, with some examples.

I mean basically, I see RSS as a “notification” system. It was poorly designed for a notification system, true, since I have to keep actively pinging servers – ideally, there would be a server I could listen to and get told when the blog updates itself. In fact, MSN Alerts offers exactly that blogs now, which is why I’ve opted to support it… but since not everyone does this, I’m content to use FeedDemon as my watchdog, which pings my RSS feeds once an hour. What I was hoping for from TUS was a way to know “hey, come read the site because there’s something new posted” or maybe get a list of the new posts… the comment I got back from that told me that TUS was a discussion board shouldn’t be run with an RSS feed.

I don’t get it. I mean, the RSS feed would have the same information that the Home Page has: a brief synopsis and link to comments. The RSS page should have the same information. They don’t have ads at TUS so there’s no loss of revenue. So what the hell is the problem with RSS in this case? The problem is that I cared enough about the site to ask the question – and have to get sassed about it – and to keep the bookmark around… until now. Deleted.

Call it confusion, basically: why you wouldn’t add a new web page to support more readers when your web site needs readers, is just beyond me.