MovableBlog: Zeldman on RSS
April 23, 2003
Earlier I expressed disappointment that Zeldman doesn't offer an RSS feed (and used the phrase 'main offender', which was probably inappropriate). He recently commented about RSS in more detail. Mark Pilgrim's brief reply: "I'm happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice."
Somewhere in between my disappointment and the Zeldman-Mark Pilgrim mini-conversation, I noted that "I don't mind so much organizations like the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, who at least go to the trouble of writing [...] a brief summary of the article" and that an excerpt-only feed is "better than having to visit the site in question every hour or so, clamouring for an update, when the aggregator clamours for you". Kalsey and Jim Ray provide short, informative blurbs about their posts as well.
So maybe Zeldman could meet us half-way by writing a brief blurb about a recent mini-essay, he would give us what we want (an update when and about what he posts) which would encourage us to visit the actual site and see his in the graphical context. (To be fair, he actually does touch on this, so he's well within his right of not meeting us at all.) But as for his assertion that "RSS feeds seem to have commodified the personal web space, turning every scribbler into a pundit or 'journalist,'", didn't weblogs already do that?
Update Thursday April 24, 2:40 PM: Zeldman now has a feed available, on an experimental basis. We continue to admire him for hand-coding his site, and slightly more now for hand coding RSS.