The RSS Blog has used an RSS feed hosted on Google FeedBurner for many years, though recently we moved to a new feed on this domain, giving us more control and a chance to retain subscribers when FeedBurner someday shuts down.
FeedBurner is putting things in the feed that aren't in the source feed we provide to the service, like these channel-level elements from the itunes namespace:
<itunes:keywords>bad,podcast</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:summary>If I ever do a podcast, I guess this'll be the description.</itunes:summary>
<itunes:subtitle>If I ever do a podcast, I guess this'll be the description.</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:category text="Technology">
<itunes:category text="Podcasting"/>
</itunes:category>
It also adds enclosure elements to items that don't contain media enclosures -- along with more itunes elements. Unfortunately, the elements FeedBurner puts in cause the feed to fail validation in the RSS Validator.
After some digging I found that this weirdness is happening because at some point the FeedBurner settings for the feed turned on SmartCast, an enhancement that enables feeds to support podcasts when an item in contains one. Here's some documentation explaining the process:
When composing a new posting with your publishing tool, simply insert a link to your podcast content directly into the text. FeedBurner will take the first anchor (<a>) tag that it finds in your posting content and convert the linked URL into an RSS 2.0 <enclosure> element if FeedBurner detects the item is in a popular audio, video, or streaming media format. This conversion turns this feed item into content that current podcasting clients will download for use (see a list of clients at the bottom of this post).
This functionality was a boon for bloggers on platforms that didn't support podcasting yet.
Our RSS feed doesn't contain any podcasts. We can't turn off SmartCast without our old FeedBurner account, but this post should help some publishers whose feeds also have become haunted by phantom podcasting tags.
Categories: RSS, FeedBurner, RSS Feeds, SmartCast
The story of RSS has been told in fanzine form by cartoonist Audra McNamee and contributor Allia Service in RSS is (Not) Dead (Yet). The 12-page comic released in 2023 describes how the original RSS boom died 10 years earlier when Google Reader shut down, after which the rise of social media did further harm by pulling users into silos and rejecting the ethos of the open web.
McNamee and Service go on to tell how RSS has experienced another boom with the enormous popularity of podcasting. But they argue that it is again under threat from the same kind of corporate greed:
Podcast streamers are buying up podcast media companies and targeted advertising companies, and trying to monopolize distribution (e.g. get everyone to use their app.
I felt very seen by the part about infighting and "warring visions" within the RSS community. It hasn't always been easy to be a member of the RSS Advisory Board, but there's some satisfaction in seeing how much RSS still matters today. McNamee and Service did a charming job of making that point.
Categories: RSS, Podcasting, RSS Is Dead, Audra McNamee, Allia Service
The non-profit advocacy group Open RSS has an interesting RSS scoreboard that rates the RSS readers that request its feeds, indicating whether they meet the following criteria: open source, self-hostable, filtering, search, folders, import/export, full-text mode, mark read on scroll, sorting, custom rules, language translation and offline reading. The page also indicates whether they have browser extensions and what operating systems they're on.
This is too much information for a casual RSS user, but as an experienced consumer of feeds I appreciate being able to shop around for a new reader based on the features I care about. Open RSS has compiled a lot of information in one place. A reader I'm thinking about using, Miniflux, supports all but two features on the list!
Open RSS gives each reader an overall status score (hover over the icons in the row to see them):
- Green check mark: This app is likely compatible with RSS feeds
- Yellow warning triangle: This app has unresolved issues that may cause RSS feeds not to so work well when used in the application
- Red stop circle: This reader remains incompatible with RSS feeds due to the overwhelming amount of unresolved issues its owners refuse to resolve
- Red stop circle: This reader is no longer maintained and is known to be incompatible with RSS feeds
- Gray dot: The status of this application hasn't been determined yet
The popular RSS reader Inoreader scores particularly badly, as detailed on a page listing all of the problems. According to Open RSS, Inoreader uses multiple networks "to request feeds too frequently," does not identify itself, requests feeds from the wrong URLs and does not update feed requests.
Categories: RSS, Open RSS, Inoreader, Miniflux, RSS Readers
The RSS Blog has added a new RSS feed hosted at our domain. Copy this URL into your feed reader of choice to get our blog posts every time we update:
https://rssweblog.com/rss-feed
For most of this blog's existence we've been hosting our RSS feed at FeedBurner, the Google service that was once used for feed readership analytics and other feed enhancements. These days it only offers caching and proxy redirects. That feed will continue to work for the people who don't switch over. At one time this blog's feed had over 6,000 subscribers, according to FeedBurner.
There are still a lot of people getting that feed, which is appreciated as we resume regular posting again. Hosting the feed on this server means we'll be able to see what RSS readers and other software are requesting it, which is useful information when you're coming up with things to write about.
Categories: RSS, FeedBurner, RSS Feeds
The free audiobook service LibriVox, which has volunteers narrating thousands of books in the public domain, offers an RSS feed for each book. Here's the RSS feed for This Crowded Earth, a 1958 science fiction novel by Robert Bloch: https://librivox.org/rss/2921
There's an item element in the feed for each chapter with an enclosure containing the audio of that chapter. Add the feed's URL to podcasting software to listen to the book as a podcast.
The book feeds are valid RSS but we have one suggestion for an improvement. The feeds could work in a wider range of podcast clients if there was a guid element in each item such as this:
<guid isPermaLink="false">thiscrowdedearth_01_bloch_64kb.mp3</guid>
This guid uses the filename of a chapter as the unique value. When there's no guid RSS readers look at the item's link for a possible unique identifier, but these feeds use the book's URL in every item.
Categories: RSS, RSS Guid, Podcasting, Audiobooks
The RSS Blog now has a favorite freestyle skateboarder. Tony Gale is making sure that visitors to the website of his professional association know about RSS:
I've been working on the website for the WFSA -- the World Freestyle Skateboarding Association -- for the best part of a year.
It has become very apparent that next to no one knows what RSS is these days (or realizes that it still exists), and I think that needs to change -- so this is now on the sidebar for every article on the site.
RSS is the most useful tool possible for getting away from the "siloification" of the internet. It needs to be more widely used!
Here's a screenshot showing how Gale is promoting RSS. Great job!
Categories: RSS, RSS Feeds, Skateboarding
The blogosphere has regrown some connective tissue with the presence of Feedle, a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Feedle is both a consumer and producer of RSS, as developer Preslav Rachev explained in the launch announcement from 2022:
The thing I like most about Feedle is that it is about making RSS feeds more accessible to the general public. And not just any RSS feeds. The team has decided to carefully curate what goes inside the index, focusing on the content by individuals and small organizations (startups, collectives, teams, etc.) first.
But what is Feedle after all? It is a dedicated search engine for blogs and podcasts -- anything with a public RSS feed. What makes it unique is that every search on Feedle is also its own RSS feed. This allows visitors to subscribe to topics of interest rather than hundreds of individual feeds.
To subscribe to an RSS feed for a search on Feedle, click the orange RSS button on a page of search results and the URL of the feed appears to the left of the button. Here's the feed for the term "RSS specification":
https://feedle.world/rss/?query=RSS+specification
Copy the URL and add the feed in your RSS reader.
Feedle has a submission form for bloggers seeking to be included in its database of blogs. The most recent count I've seen indicates there are 2,000 blogs in its database. There were once several popular blog search engines, including Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket, but they've all shut down or morphed into something else. In the early days of blogging the best way to find people talking about your posts was on Technorati. Founder David Sifry shows up in the comments of The RSS Blog as we helped them tackle some bugs.
Categories: RSS, Blog Search, Feedle, Technorati
