RSS feed: useful? replace?

[jendefig]

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Working on this today and going through landing page. Noticed the RSS feed link under the email entry box is broken.

[rogermparent]

Is it actually broken? That looks like an RSS feed to me, they're pretty ugly when looked at raw. Have you tried opening it in an RSS Reader?

[jorgeorpinel]

Thanks @jendefig ! It's supposed to look like that 😋 (meant for 🤖 RSS readers not hooman 🐶)

[jendefig]

Okie dokie. I'm totally lost.

[jorgeorpinel]

Hehe no worries. What it means is that if for example you install an in-browser reader like this extension fro Chrome, then when you open https://dvc.org/blog/rss.xml it looks like this:

[rogermparent]

It's an easy mistake to make! Very few people use RSS these days.

if for example you install an in-browser reader

One important thing to know is that RSS readers started as external applications, so people could get email-like notifications for new website content without having to actually go to every website and check- this is the primary reason we offer RSS and don't just direct people to a human-readable page.

Things like push notifications and massive platforms with channel subscriptions have pushed RSS to the outskirts, but some people still like to use them and it's not too much effort to maintain in our setup.

[jendefig]

@rogermparent @jorgeorpinel Thanks for this explanation.
I don't use them, but did try to back in the day when they became popular and I remember just clicking on something that enabled me to add to my RSS feed, but I never saw any code. I would have immediately left and never used it. I must have had an in-browser reader.

[jorgeorpinel]

Maybe the Q is whether we want this since it's probably a technology "on the way out". Feel free to reopen this to explore removing it but then again it's probably a free feature included in Gatsby so why not keep it.

[rogermparent]

Even if RSS is on the way out, it's because of other technologies that take the same "slot" like JSON Feed. I'd probably opt to include a choice of feeds (maybe on a human-readable "feeds" page that takes the existing links) before removing RSS.

[jorgeorpinel]

Do we have/want a JSON feed?

[rogermparent]

Have: not currently, unless somehow one of the Gatsby libraries does it automatically- even if so, we don't link to it.
Want: not high priority, but if someone asks for it we could do so. I think we were asked about RSS which is why we have it now. Maybe we'd introduce it if feeds get overhauled for any other reason.

[jendefig]

If i'm not mistaken, the reason the RSS feed was added in the first place was because of this Slack message about a way for people to see the kind of mail they will get easily before signing up. The RSS was the low-hanging fruit. But if it's not useful we could ditch in exchange for doing a page as mentioned in the thread. Is there a way to tell how many hits we get on the RSS button?

[yathomasi]

I don't think replacing it with any other format will do any good. We can leverage the RSS feed to send emails to our subscribers and I can see Mailchimp provides such automation. We can collaborate if we want to get this done.

[shcheklein]

Ppl still use RSS for automation (e.g we are subscribed to SO questions about DVC and publish them into Slack), crawlers use them to extract snippets, etc. I would not remove this, I think it's good to provide all the basic ways of publishing. Unless it gives us some headaches, but ASAIK it comes pretty much our of the box with Gatsby?

[rogermparent]

it comes pretty much our of the box with Gatsby?

Not quite "out of the box" since we have to translate blog post nodes into feed data, but it's much easier than the average feature especially where we already have it set up. Definitely not replacing the RSS feed, like I mentioned earlier in the thread I think our viable choices are either sticking with what we have now or including additional formats like JSON feed, and we've got enough on our plate that this can sit as it is for a while.