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Robb Knight

@paulcuth Hey Paul, really love the site but I’m a bit confused by the decision to proxy all feeds through the site rather than setting the original feed in the head to be picked up by feed readers (and adding “rss is dead lol” to the title). It worries me that it’s another step and possible failure point if someone subscribes to my feed that way.

2 March at 4:07 | Wall-to-wall | Open on social.lol
8 comments
Robb Knight

@paulcuth Also (and this falls into the failure point I mentioned) subscribing to my feed this way doesn’t work and shows nothing. Someone might subscribe and assume they’ll get new posts but they won’t.

Feed example rss-is-dead.lol/feed/?url=http

2 March at 4:10 | Open on social.lol
paulcuth

@robb Hi Robb 👋

It looks like some readers display the page title in the "Subscribe to feed?" prompt, rather than the feed title. They seem to use the feed title once subscribed, but I agree it's confusing.

I've now removed the site title from the page, so hopefully that will help. (Pages are cached for an hour, so you may still see it for a little bit.)

2 March at 7:31 | Open on mastodon.social
paulcuth

@robb As for proxying the feed, there's a few reasons I thought it might be better…

Some blogs have quite verbose index pages, and what I really wanted was to get a quick overview of what to expect in the feed, if I were to subscribe.

Some feeds don't link to the blog index, and some don't link to pages that link back to the feed, which can be slow and an awkward experience.

2 March at 7:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Robb Knight

@paulcuth Also fwiw, I like the proxied overview pages. Because of the NNW issue, I wrongly thought the whole feed was proxied.

2 March at 7:53 | Open on social.lol
paulcuth

@robb I'm not sure why subscribing to your own feed didn't work though, it should be exactly the same experience as subscribing directly on the page linked in the profile.

Fwiw, I subscribed to your feed fine using Inoreader. What reader are you using?

2 March at 7:49 | Open on mastodon.social
Robb Knight

@paulcuth Apologies - you are doing exactly what I thought (in my tired state I must have looked at it wrong). I think what's happening is NetNewsWire isn't looking for a feed because the URL ends with .xml

And apologies for the title thing, again I think this might be a NNW issue not looking for the actual feed.

2 March at 7:50 | Open on social.lol
paulcuth

@robb It's all good... I'm learning a lot about other feed readers today 😆

2 March at 7:53 | Open on mastodon.social
Robb Knight

@paulcuth Aren't we all 😅

I'm not sure how to get around this - I tried with additional query strings on the end but it still picks up the page as a feed but NNW is pretty popular on iOS/Mac so it'd be good to come up with something.

Obviously I have no idea how the site works but I'm thinking encoding the feed URL with base64 or something would fix it because the it wouldn't end with “.xml”

2 March at 8:00 | Open on social.lol
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