I’ve noticed a number of interesting blogs over the past couple of weeks that are hosted on Blogger – mostly because there are comments or trackbacks to postings here. As a rule, I’ll go and read a few posts on the blog that’s linking, and more often than not I’ll subscribe to it – but that’s almost impossible to do if it’s a Blogger blog.
Why? They don’t have RSS feeds.
Apparently (after digging through the Blogger FAQs) RSS feeds are a Blogger Pro feature. The standard service doesn’t provide any kind of syndication – instead they recommend you go to Feedburner
Which strikes me as quite frankly daft. What’s the point of offering any kind of blog service – free or paid for – that doesn’t provide syndication? Surely that’s an integral part of what blogs are about – it’s a bit like a rental company offering their cars without steering wheels unless you upgrade to their premium rates. I can understand wanting to hold back some features as an incentive to upgrade to a higher revenue service – but surely syndication is a fundamental?
UPDATE: Commenters have commented, and I stand corrected: standard Blogger does have syndication – Atom 0.3 to be precise – but it’s not necessarily obvious if the blogger (this could get complicated – “I’m a Blogger blogger”) uses custom templates and doesn’t push their feed.
Which is just as bizarre as a blogging service not having feeds in the first place if you think about it – why would you want to have a blog without a feed? It’s a bit like hiring a rental car, but then declining the rear offside wheel along with the collision damage waiver…
They do provide (and have started to push) Atom 0.3 for syndication. Of course, people with custom templates have to add the feed into their site.
Blogger (the free version) has had syndication built in and available to its users since at least the beginning of last year (when I started using it). Just look for http://sitename.blogspot.com/atom.xml. If the blogger has chosen to publish a feed, that’s where you’ll find it. It’s possible that the blogs at which you are looking have chosen not to publish RSS feed, in which case those bloggers are the daft ones, not the Blogger service.
Was about to say the same as above
. Old Blogger Pro users can publish either RSS or Atom, but everyone else can just use Atom. The two formats are pretty much interchangeable now anyway.