The logo web feeds use.The logo web feeds use.
The internet has truly become an awful place to explore. Virtually nothing of personality or character is left, and with the rise of artificial intelligence, much of the text-based content is dying out. In retrospect, it is our own decision to have allowed for a mediocre web from the start, especially with the rise of Web 2.0. The internet now is a melting pot of everything the world used to offer, including the horrible. Now, you do not only use the internet for all of your entertainment, but also for video games, listening to music, filling out government documents, research, and shopping. How we normalised this in such an irrational manner still wonders me. Unfortunately, it will progressively become worse as time goes on with new technologies being used as bandages for this broken web. This is not me being pessimistic either; it seems as if there will always be a race for pushing artificial intelligence into as much junk as possible, which I am clearly not rooting for.
The effect of this is, you either avoid any website other than social media (or your favourite content creating website that slowly integrates the crap from the rotten internet) or you NEVER go two clicks without an ad-blocker because every website you visit for the most basic question thrashes you down with 20 ads. Also, most of internet users use an search engine because finding decent websites that are not just producing slop is becoming increasingly difficult. These in return serve you ai results because it has become so difficult to ask even the most basic questions in life, but obviously, I refuse to fully trust them...
Sadly, the time before the internet age will never come back (unless we go extinct), meaning there will always be a requirement to have an internet connection available at all times. This is obviously problematic, but it is something to live with if you accept the fact that you can not just take a binary approach to this problem ("either I use the internet at its fullest or I plug off the internet"). However, it is not necessary to always use it for everything in life (or to neglect it entirely), and you can filter out the bad using alternative means. It can be outside the technological realm such as books, but I personally believe there is also a great amount of software that allows for a different kind of interaction with the internet. You do not have to always use the web browser to access entertainment or utilities; you can find software that allows you to use the internet without a web browser. One of those technologies allowing for partial content extraction is RSS. It is a simple way for a website to provide updates; be that new blog posts, software updates or even social media posts. You interact with it via an RSS-Reader that will fetch the RSS feed and format it accordingly.
RSS is a very old internet technology. It was initially released in 1999 (as of writing, 27 years ago), which is quite old to say the least. Nine years prior, in 1990, TimBL created the world wide web, which we usually define as the modern internet. Now, it would not be too revealing to say that I was not born during this time, but from what I learned reading people's experiences online, it was very expensive and very small (here is an archive on how most websites looked like). Over time, it became clear that having to constantly check every website for new updates would be perhaps a bit too tedious. This is where RSS likely came into place to try to unify the process of checking for changes. It was soon adopted in the 2000s, especially under the transition of what we today use the internet for: Enjoying content. As time went on, much of the RSS feeds were succeeded by other means (such as phone apps). Nevertheless, many websites still provide a way to interact with their content via RSS such as news sites, Reddit, and YouTube. However, there are a lot of things most people never think about when advocating for more websites to use them. It was only when I wanted to create my own RSS feed that I ran into problems and thought a bit more about this protocol.
First of all, RSS is not RSS. Not that none of them are, but rather that RSS is not what it may seem it is. Today, people prefer to call RSS as they are used to it, just like how many of us call things not based on what they actually are but rather on the most prominent brand of it. Just like how Champagne is just sparkling wine, RSS is just a web feed, but it is not the only web feed to exist. In fact, there are also Atom feeds and even JSON feeds (my goodness just why?). In fact, out of all these web feeds, RSS is the oldest one, and had been planned to be replaced by Atom feeds. This is not really an issue anymore as most RSS apps support both RSS and Atom (also JSON feeds, but screw that). I initially wanted to use RSS 2.0, but I found Atom to be easier to create a web feed with it. Maybe I just rushed it, but it was not very easy to find simple information (ironic right?). I tried to use the official specification, but I could not get it work in the sense that I wanted it to be, which is creating full RSS articles.
If you create an RSS feed, you need to create a comment, which is the entire text of an RSS news. In RSS, this is the <description> tag, and in Atom feeds it is the <entry> tag. That is it. The example found on Wikipedia literally just is mostly formatting. That is because RSS, like any other web feed protocol, does not necessarily encourage you to create good RSS feeds. What I am saying is that most RSS feeds simply are a way to receive notifications about newly uploaded content without providing the actual content. Instead, it outputs a short amount of text, mostly just a substitle or short description, so in order to fully read the content, you have to open your web browser and read the content there (with all the ads and pop ups and constant loading). This makes sense on Reddit for instance, where the content is just the question, but on news sites, it is the norm to see a great amount of nothing inside your RSS feed so that you have to constantly go onto their website. As news articles just push out so much crap, it can be very difficult to actually read anything because of how much has to load. This makes RSS virtually useless (unless you know a special trick, which I will show you in the next blog post), so using E-Mail to receive the headlines does the same job.
Writing an RSS feed Is not fun. Especially if you do it handwritten and manually like I do. You now have to do more work on your website by having to copy an exhausting amount of content from your original work and past it with the same format on your RSS feed. Additionally, taking care of it is quite exhausting. Any typo and any mistake can screw your RSS feed off by a large margin. You have to upload your web feed with a specific timestamp format, which okay sure, but why does it have to be so precise and in such an annoying way? Why even have to use it when you can not just base it on how it is sorted (top entry is listed as first)? I understand and respect the standard, but it is just more work for something so unnecessary.
But here is why I still have committed towards creating a webfeed: Because there is a need for it.
There can always be a better option or a new implementation, but when most discontinue a decent way to interact with the internet, it can seem as if the whole concept is not worth it. If websites continue to stop using RSS or Atom, it may trickle down further towards the entire deprecation of web feeds because "nobody is using them". There are only a few websites left where you have the option, and quite frankly speaking, after becoming a user of these web feeds, I kept thinking to myself why I complain about something that I have not managed to do as well. Had I written a post about how great RSS is without providing one for my website, I would look like a performative y2ker. It would just be such a contradiction, and so I found it to be even a duty to provide one for my website. However, I was not willing to just leave it as an announcement, which is why you just spent 8 minutes reading this lol
I became more critical about the, in today's age, ancient standards for providing a web feed. I personally think that after all this time, there should have been something more useful, but I guess we are stuck with what we had. I have a lot more understanding for the distain towards it, but I still think there is an importance in providing one.
Therefore, I am happy to announce that my website is available via an Atom feed! C:
