Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

Where's your own RSS icon then!? ;)

All jokes aside, you just described literally all the points I encountered while developing the built-in feed reader for HeyHomepage.com Good summary!

One thing I notice a lot of people say - like you - is "forcing users to link through to read the article on the original site (semi defeating the point of subscribing via feedreader)".

I don't really agree and my own approach focuses explicitly on sending visitors to the original site. I only show the snippet, even when the full content is in the feed. Imagine you did your best for your website, made it nice and shiny, you want people to see the site as well. The original site usually contains more content, like a photo or image, which might also be useful for visitors. Besides, I want the webmasters to know I was there by showing up in the visitor statistics (I attach a '&rss_ref=heyhomepage.com' to the end of the link to the original site).

I'm not saying one way is good and the other bad - there are valid reasons for seeing a feed reader more as an aggregator - but I wanted to point out there are valid reasons for doing the opposite as well.

His homepage has a `link rel="alternate"` meta and that's all that matters.

Original link should be preserved, but I disagree with you on the moral of appending '&rss_ref=heyhomepage.com' to the links. It is still tracking. Besides, server-side feed aggregators have a valid reason to cache the feed and canonicalize the item url to avoid dupes.

An RSS icon has an important signaling function, if you ask me. Automatic discovery is good, but why not also have a textual link or icon pointing to your feed!?

The original link to the feed is preserved for my users to click on. My system - in use with the user - pointing the user to someone else's website accompanied by a GET var containing the user's own URL is not tracking. The end website can also know that info from the HTTP referrer. It's a very crude implementation of a webmention, in a sense. Because it's not necessarily about the linking website, but about telling someone's RSS feed is in use!

> but why not also have a textual link or icon pointing to your feed!?

Sure. I was only providing my perspective, the perspective of a RSS feed aggregator writer. To me, automatic discovery is more important than an icon.

I am not sure you and I are talking about the same thing. I am against appending random query string to an otherwise perfectly fine url because it adds to the burden of the feed aggregator if it wants to de-duplicate the links gathered from various sources. Of course you are free to append anything to the URLs on your website for any purposes.

> I am not sure you and I are talking about the same thing. I am against appending random query string to an otherwise perfectly fine url because it adds to the burden of the feed aggregator if it wants to de-duplicate the links gathered from various sources.

The appended query string is only added to links in my system, not to any public feed. Otherwise, I agree with you.

> I attach a '&rss_ref=heyhomepage.com' to the end of the link to the original site

That is incredibly unsound (on a technical level, not merely in matters of taste).

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