Re: Elevate your website's RSS feed

Chris asks: How much thought do you give to the RSS feed on your blog?. Well, quite a bit I'd think, but probably not as much as Chris does. Two aspects to the answer: The raison d'être of my site and the limitiations of the medium.

There are many reasons I put something online, but honestly most are selfish. No, I don't want to make any money of this. I don't want to make a name for myself. Nothing of that. But I want to have fun. I said it in the inaugural post: This site exists as an attempt at rekindling what was the passion that drew me into my field. And at the time of writing this, a successful attempt. I also reap many other benefits that I had not thought of when I started. Michael Nielsen wrote an article on how a website can be used to enhance one's ability to think and create, which resonated very much with me when I read it. Writing is my preferred method of sense-making. Public writing raises the stakes and as a by-product the quality of the thinking. And then, over the course of time, I was lucky to discover that it also facilitates the joy of connecting on a direct personal level with many kind and interesting folks.

Of course I also want what I create to be useful not only for me, but to anybody who cares. And I love feeds because they empower the readers. Therefore I pretty soon started to offer one. See, this site started completely hand-rolled and the the feed generation was the first part I automated. First very clunkily, with help of a third-party service, then I scripted the feed generation, and out of that script grew my custom SSG intertwingle. So, offering a feed is to me not only a right neighbourly thing to do on the open web, but a principle.

Then, you may ask: why is this not popping up in it, you hypocrite? Well, Internet stage-fright. Sounds ridiculous, but it's what it is for me at the moment. So I simply lower the stakes for me again, just a bit, without going back to the private-tiddlywiki-for-my-eyes-only mode. And as this little secret garden grows, I start to see that it might soon yield some fruits that could deserve make it to other people's feed readers, because just as Chris wrote: I want to earn the right to stay there.

One last aspect: feeds come with limitiations in a few cases - it does not apply for the majority of documents, but to an in my eyes very important category: interactive content that is unique to the web as a medium. The current specs/formats (RSS, Atom, JsonFeed) are just not defined for such content. For example, I wrote two tiny literate javascript programs that describe themself on the very page where they are also executed. I could also add many other examples from other people's work, where it is just not technically possible to give subscribers on the feed the equivalent experience as in the browser.

The web as a medium is not just a better old thing, and should not restrict itself to emulate paper. I certainly hope that feeds will technologically evolve over their current capabilities (which were specified in the early oughts) at some point in time.