One of my biggest annoyances of late is finding an interesting/cool/useful blog, only to discover that they have neither an RSS feed nor an Atom feed. This annoys me because, as a rule, I don’t visit blogs by hand. In other words, usually after my first visit to a blog, I add it to my aggregator, and then read it that way.
I happen to be using Omea from JetBrains, but I have also used SauceReader, SharpReader, FeedDemon, FeedReader and BottomFeeder. Anyway, once I find a good blog that has a proper feed, I add it to my aggregator, and then read it through that tool, whenever there’s new stuff to read. I don’t go back to the blog in my browser. So, when a good blog has no feed, I get very annoyed. What usually happens at that point is I add a bookmark to the blog in question, and then promptly forget that I ever saw it.
With the word “blog” getting so much press lately, I think it might be a good thing to say that to truly be called a blog, you have to have an RSS/Atom/feed-flavor-du-jour. It wouldn’t really solve anything, of course, but precise terms are always nice to have.
My other feed annoyance is invalid feeds, but I can’t really say much about that because my own Atom feed is currently missing a field… My excuse is that I didn’t write the exporter, I just used someone else’s code… Yes, I know… I need to get it fixed…
