JM (@moonmehta.bsky.social)

For the love of RSS feeds, simplify your blog’s subscribe page I love reading blogs, newsletters, and virtually anything else on the Web through RSS feeds. As a space writer, it’s the best way for me to keep track of, read, and search what hundreds of sources publish every week. And, I proactively offer my own readers an option to subscribe to my blogs through RSS. Even though I have thousands of email subscribers, I care about this option because it provides people a private and reliably way to read my blogs without having to trust me with their email IDs. Why offer anything less than what you prefer yourself? However, most people don’t know what RSS feeds are, and how feed readers can benefit them. I wrote an accessible article about RSS, which anecdotally made some headway within my friends and little network of humans. But even then most people have a notion that RSS is complicated to use. These notions carry terse truths. Compared to the ease of following someone on social media or subscribing to a newsletter, it’s far from obvious what you’re supposed to do when you encounter an RSS feed icon or link. Even for people who do know about and use RSS readers, it’s still a chore to manually hunt, grab, and add RSS links to their feed readers. How do we simplify this? I redid my space blog’s **RSS feeds page** to offer big buttons for people to subscribe to my posts on every feed reader I could think of. Did you check the page already? Clicking or tapping on any button on that page does one of these two things: 1. If you already use that particular feed reader service/app, you can add my blog to it in two taps. Bam. 2. If you don’t use that reader, most of them will present you with a login & signup option. This way people can directly use a feed reader with at least one blog added instead of having to imagine and figure out what they are and how they work. Isn’t this solution better than the status quo? At least fellow netizens James and Ashur agree. I went ahead and added these two-tap buttons on my personal blog’s feeds page as well. 🤓 These direct-subscribe links work based on special dynamic URLs. I’ve hunted down special URLs for more than 20 feed readers for my feeds pages. Very few RSS readers are missing from the list, and that’s only because they don’t support such a URL structure or scheme—as far as I can tell. I’ve reached out to various such developers to add support for the same. I’m hoping to add direct-subscribe links for Reeder Classic, Feedgrab, Miniflux, and popular Android-only apps. Any tips you have for me to add those or other RSS apps/services are welcome. * * * **P.S.** I absolutely know that many people will still find RSS confusing and just won’t use it. That war is for another day—perhaps if and when the Web is about to come full circle to blogs from the clutches of social media? For now, I’m happy to have made the RSS situation at least a little better than I found it. This is the kind of post which is so niche that most people will wonder what I’m even rambling about. But I don’t care because it has made me feel happy. https://journal.jatan.space/simplifying-blog-subscriptions-via-rss/