On RSS and Atom:
Go to https://go.dev/blog/ and get the url for the feed... should be simple, right? As you may've noticed, there's no button or link anywhere on the page! Why not?
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that the hard part of using feeds is discovery: not only do you have to find cool blogs, you've also got to deal with inconsistent feed advertisement!! =|:(
The astute among you might be screaming something about <link>s and <a>s with "rel='alternate'", and yes, those are certainly nice (and feed-discovery extensions are handy to see them), but they're not always obvious or easy to actually utilize. Especially in the <link> case where you're dealing with an invisible element in the document's <head>...
Now, lots of blogs do actually display their feed urls (after all, whatever webmaster might've even had to put in some work to get them there), but I've also seen blogs that don't even have the "rel='alternate'" attributes on the articles themselves, just the blog index (which isn't wrong or anything, just something to be mindful of).
Add on the fact that rss can be quite fragile at times, as well as the fact that there's seemingly little agreement on what extensions to use for what formats, and it unfortunately starts to make sense why feeds aren't exactly all the rage. =|:/
Also, surprisingly hard to find a good feed reader, lol. I just use thunderbird, but when I've looked for better, or server-side, readers, the ones I've tried out have been a worse experience overall. Feels a lot like the situation xmpp and matrix are in.
But I do love feeds, and I think you should too! This post was mostly spurred on by the above go.dev blog, so take it with a grain of salt considering the recency bias... Feeds are a really good way to experience the internet in my opinion! For a forgetful person like me, it's great to not have to bookmark a buncha websites and remember to manually check them, I just wait until they show up in thunderbird, and I check my email enough to see new entries anyway! =|:3 But even if you use a server-side reader, you've just gotta visit one link now, instead of N links.
