Feed Me

It occurred to me that I had better look into this blog-feed business, just in case I needed to do something. I'd sort of assumed that anyone who wanted to could add the URL of this blog to their feed, and hey presto, job done! But, as someone who has had to deal with computers since 1978, the incredible naiveté of that assumption was obvious as soon as I thought it out loud. Yeah, right.

So, if you already have a blog-feed reader set up, it seems the simplest thing is for you to add one of the following URLs to your reader, depending on whether it uses the Atom or the RSS standards:

• Atom 1.0: https://idiotic-hat.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
• RSS 2.0: https://idiotic-hat.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

If that's you, give it a try, and let me know if it works.

However,  I thought I should probably do something for the more computer-challenged constituency who have been enjoying the email service (all 685 of them? As above: yeah, right). Foolishly, I thought this, too, would be straightforward, but it's not (is there a "yeah, right" emoticon?). It turns out that the single readily-available gadget is Blogger's own, which offers Atom, a standard feed, but not RSS, also a standard. I've no idea why not both. It also offers the two services netvibes and My Yahoo!, about which I know nothing, and which I would not encourage anyone to sign up for simply in order to read this blog. But that's all that is available on what is, after all, a free blogging platform: it seems that all non-Blogger gadgets, widgets, and wotsits (of which there used to be many, such as the soon-to-be-obsolete mail service in question) have vanished from the Blogger set-up interface since the recent redesign.

Having installed the Blogger feed, briefly, I found that when I clicked on it all I got was a massive barf of XML code (which is what Atom or RSS send to a feed-reader). So I immediately took it off again. There's no way a naive user could be confronted with that and think, as I did, "Aha, this is a stream of XML code, and probably needs to be captured by something...  I wonder if my web browser requires an extension?" They're far more likely to think, "WTF? This thing's broken my computer!" and panic. 

Obviously, any solution I offer has to accommodate the new-but-naive reader, the one who thinks, "I like this blog! I'll just click that button there so I can be notified of new posts..." At which point, said new-but-naive user will inevitably be thrown into confusion if they are immediately overwhelmed by yards of computeroid gobbledegook. Because, as far as I can tell, none of the commonly-used web-browsers is equipped, by default, to handle the business of interpreting Atom or RSS XML feeds: you need to have chosen and added a third-party "extension" to your browser to enable this. But I suspect that this may be a step too far into techie territory for many. In the end, it's a conundrum: the only users who would be able to use a blog-feed would be those who are probably already doing so.

Annoying, isn't it? It seems I may have to investigate third party solutions. Or, possibly, it may be time to consider a change of blog provider. Sigh... This is just like being back at work. Mysterious barricades at every turn; incompatible user needs and demands; inadequate software; the best, as always, the implacable enemy of the good. Of course, if there really were 685 followers inconvenienced by the expiry of the email service, I'd spare no effort. But I suspect that the likes of Damaris Salazar and Maria Antolin that I identified in the previous post are mere constructs of some feed-boosting algorithm.

So speak to me, you real people, either by commenting or by private communication: how much of a problem will it be for those of you who have been receiving new posts by email to set yourself up with a blog-feed using the URLs above or, like me, simply to go vole every now and then? I have few enough readers not to want to lose any to simple inertia.