RSS Feed Updates

Please change your Collected Editions RSS subscription to https://collectededitions.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

“I apologize …”

I’ve been doing some infrastructure work on the site (more details to come) and that includes updating the RSS feed. The Feedburner service that managed the RSS feed also let you receive posts by email, but that has been discontinued, and a few other drawbacks lead me to think it’s time to delete the Feedburner feed entirely.

So, I will be shutting down the RSS feed that contains “feedburner” in the URL on November 1, and just running the RSS feed from the blog domain. I apologize; I try to avoid updates that require changes on your end, but this one seems unavoidable. Hopefully if you change the URL in your RSS reader now, the disruption should be minimal.

Just to be clear, the “new” main RSS feed is already running, I still intend to have an RSS feed in perpetuity, and this is no indication of anything happening to the site.

RSS what?

I try to support all the popular ways to keep up with this site — you can just come visit, of course 👋, but also the Facebook page, the Twitter/X feed, and Mastodon. Another of these is RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication”; if that’s not your feed of choice, no problem, don’t worry, and none of the above will affect you.

I personally do most of my blog reading via RSS, a kind of XML feed for individual websites that’s updated every time the website has new content, presented to you via an RSS “reader.” Think about it like an email inbox just for website updates — Google Reader is a well known former example. Here’s the Wikipedia article on RSS, as well as a recent article from The Tyee that does a good job recounting RSS' history, though erroneously suggesting RSS' demise (Birchtree has a good pushback on that one).

I like RSS because by and large it’s open-source, free, anonymous, and easy — following or unfollowing a site is as simple as adding or deleting the feed from my RSS reader. And again, RSS feeds in this context are just XML, so you can customize the presentation of the text however you like, to the extent offered by your reader. If you’re wondering, I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader — also free, also open-source.

There might be a theme here aborning. Stay tuned …