

Moving RSS forward - julien
http://blog.superfeedr.com/moving-feed-readers-forward/

======
julien
Generally, it's hard to convince nerds that something trivial to them is not
trivial to non nerds.

In what reality is it obvious that "to 'get more of something' I have to copy
a url (what's a url?) from a browser tab to another web application?"

Before telling me that poeple just have to click the "feed icon", watch this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ> and ask yourself if you think
people will go from:

"I want more of this site" to "Why don't I click that funky little orange icon
in the address bar?"

~~~
ernesth
Subscribing to an RSS feed is exactly as difficult as bookmarking a site: if I
use the browser's own ability, it is a click near the URL then a click on the
"Bookmark page" button (or menu) respectively a click on the "Subscribe"
button; if I use a web based aggregator, it gets very difficult as I have to
click on the so-called bookmarklet in my bookmark bar.

The first part may only be true in old Firefox and Opera.

~~~
julien
I disagree. Bookmarking is something people understand better because they've
done that for centuries. Even the word makes more sense 'book marking'.
"Subscribing" on the other end is what people used to do when they paid to get
magazine delivered to their places...

~~~
ernesth
> "Subscribing" on the other end is what people used to do [...] to get
> magazine delivered to their places.

Which is what RSS does! It gets the next issues of the "magazine" delivered to
your place.

------
yasth
Does this actually solve the problem?

I mean they offer two text prompts "Follow this Blog" which makes me think
that it will take me to twitter to follow them there, and "Subscribe" which
makes me think mostly of email lists. I'd suggest something like "Track New
Posts" or the like.

Ok let's assume that you can come up with text that actually makes people want
to click it. The only help a user gets then is "Pick a service to subscribe to
this page:" which could confuse the user into thinking it is some sort of
update tracker for the particular page they are on. If a user doesn't
recognize any of those services they won't even know what they are picking.
There is no glossing, like say "Bloggtroter will let you get updates to this
site, and your other favorite sites in email". Oh and they can't click on the
sites (to say read about them) without setting a preference that is hidden. On
that why have a separate settings page at all? Just have a "View All" button
and if they click something else set that.

If you work through all that I'm still not certain the use case is actually
better than what they get if they hit the RSS feed directly and styles and
transforms are used.

~~~
julien
The point is to not make you click the button the SubToMe homepage of course,
but on blog posts that you liked, on your friends's home page... etc.

The words are then up to them.

As for users not recognizing any of the services, this is what we're trying to
solve with registration. Once you've used any subscription service once, it
will show up in the modal, rather than the defaults.

You are right though that we need to clarify what each service does to make it
easier for each user to pick their favorite services.

~~~
yasth
Well yes the words are up to the site owner, but I think you underestimate
just how hard it is to explain what RSS does, and why you'd want to do it.
Honestly if you can find a way to do that in something short enough to put on
a button, then you've pretty much solved the future of RSS.

~~~
julien
Agreed, it is hard to explain RSS and this is one of the goals of this button:
completely hide them away from the subscribers...

------
resu_nimda
You're being very defensive about the difficulty thing. How many times do I
need to see that youtube link and a variation on "no seriously, it's too
hard"?

It's not "very hard." Sure, some people don't get it, but then what are the
chances they understand your modal? Surely the act of understanding how to set
up and use an RSS client is more difficult than copying a link once you've
done that.

In all the recent discussion around Reader and RSS, I haven't seen "too hard"
as a primary concern from anyone.

------
rachelbythebay

        function addHandler() {
          navigator.registerContentHandler("application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed", 
                                           "http://your.feed.reader/add_feed?%s",
                                           "feed reader name");
        }
    

If your feed reader provider does that, then when you land on a feed, Firefox
will prompt you to add it to "feed reader name". Say yes and it will throw it
at the URL it builds up (where %s gets replaced by the feed's URL).

------
grotos
Most elegant solution is Opera implementation [1] - a simple feed icon is
displayed in the address bar if <link rel="alternate"
type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="<http://www.example.com/rss> />
is in the <head> section.

Other thing is dicoverability of that icon and learning what it does.

[1] I think Firefox does that too.

~~~
julien
What's a "Feed icon" ? Ask someone around you who is not a geek to show you
the "feed icon".

~~~
grotos
Well, that's a problem of discoverability - it seems that browsers try to hide
that icon e.g. Firefox removed it and you need extension for chrome to show
it.

------
Rangi42
Until Firefox removed the location bar's RSS icon, that's exactly how I
subscribed to feeds: click the icon and then click the "Subscribe in Google
Reader" button that loaded. That might not have worked if I used a different
client, though.

~~~
julien
What's the "RSS icon"? I have no idea.

~~~
icebraining
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feed-icon.svg>

It's the de-facto standard.

~~~
julien
Of course... print it, go outside and ask people what that ease. Ebven if you
live in SF, I bet than the vast majority will tell you it's nice but have no
idea what that is!

------
lucian1900
There's a big red warning suggesting I should enable third-party cookies.
That's just plain wrong.

~~~
julien
Lucian, what's wrong here is how Google has a bug that breaks localstorage and
which forced us to show that warning if you have that option setup :/

We would love to not show that warning, but since there is a bug in
localtsorage which can only be avoided with that, then, well, we avoid it with
that :( We'd rather show you a message than fail silently.

------
arocks
It is quite simple in Chrome. Just click on the RSS icon at the corner of the
omnibox. Then there is a drop-down showing a list of RSS readers that you can
subscribe with.

Can't think of anything simpler.

~~~
teraflop
I'm pretty sure you have some kind of RSS extension installed, because Chrome
doesn't do that by default.

~~~
eli
In fact, I suspect it's the "RSS Subscription Extension" published by Google
which disturbingly no longer seems to be available for download [1]. Click on
a feed in a regular Chrome install and you're looking at unstyled XML.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-
subscription-e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-
extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en)

~~~
alefteris
Why they had to do that? They must had deleted it recently (last cached by
google search at 9 Mar 2013). Closing down a service is one thing, not making
it easy for people to use feeds in their browser is another. And it was just
an extension, not even part of the browser. And when you see the feature creep
in Chrome lately, it makes you wonder what their priorities really are..

