Comment by netghost 2 days ago
The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me know when you have something valuable to say again!
I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
No blog is worth the hassle and honestly there is always a feed broken somewhere showing up in our reader we just wait for them to fix it. If they don't fix it then at some point it will just get deleted. That is just the reality of maintaining your own feed websites remove feeds sometimes and all you can do is go back see if its changed address and if not remove it.
But it's so little hassle: just send the blog author an email saying vaguely what the problem is!
Someone emailed me about an issue with my RSS feed once. I don't remember what the issue was anymore, but I was grateful and I fixed it. Being the author of a tiny blog, it was just really nice to know that someone wanted to read what I wrote enough to care that my RSS feed was borked.
Back like 15 to 20 years ago when I ran or helped manage some hobbyist websites, I added RSS functionality if only because it was "popular" back then.
I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at the height of adoption no less.
If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.
My SSG (Zola) offers an RSS generation option, so I turned it on. Several months later I realized it was broken for some reason and I hadn't noticed.
Nobody emailed me or anything (I'm not a popular blogger), so I just turned the RSS generation off