RSS Feeds are more important now!
Chromium announced that it is slowly rolling out a feature that would allow users to follow a particular website, right from the Chrome Menu. This is still experimental and being slowly rolled out and can change before General Availability.
Image Courtesy of https://blog.chromium.org/2021/05/an-experiment-in-helping-users-and-web.html?m=1
Though Google Reader is dead(which I never got a chance to use), Google is providing an even better way to let users find the relevant content right in their browser.
I have started regularly updating my blog recently (after almost 9 years) and I thought that's a nice push for me to set up RSS for my Blog. So here is my RSS Feed.
My website is powered by SvelteKit which is a very performant and easy to use framework. I quickly set up the RSS using https://github.com/mhatvan/markushatvan.com/blob/master/src/routes/rss.xml.ts and now it is automatically generated at build time.
Some of the things I learned
- Don't expect feeds to be updated within minutes or even hours. There are a lot of RSS Readers available and they have different techniques to pull the data from the feed. Some make it configurable. Some make it non-configurable and do it based on how frequently that RSS is updated.
- Google is going to do it very frequently as per this article from TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/19/undead-again-google-brings-back-rss/#:~:text=the web-,A Google spokesperson told me,RSS,-was one
- Don't immediately update your RSS feeds. Schedule it to be done on some action or make it time-based like 2 hours after the article is published. This is because once a Feed item has been crawled by some reader, it can be almost impossible to get that item updated in the reader later.
Related Articles
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/10-useful-rss-hacks-for-wordpress/ - Though it talks in context of WordPress but conceptually it is applicable everwhere.