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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yes please!

Another reason: I'll often come across a blog post from 12 years where the author writes "in my next post, I'll continue to discuss..."

And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? They didn't add a hyperlink, obviously, because they hadn't written it yet. Sometimes a blog has posts you can navigate by month, but that's definitely a small minority of blogs I come across.

If there was just a single-page index, I could Ctrl+F the title of the current article, and quickly see what followed it chronologically.

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> Another reason: I'll often come across a blog post from 12 years where the author writes "in my next post, I'll continue to discuss..."

Worse than that is the "part 3" blog post, where the opening paragraph of part 3 starts out with something like:

In part 1 we discussed "...one or two sentences on part 1..." and in part 2 we discussed "...part 2 quick overview..." ...

And there are no links at all in part 3 to either of parts 1 or 2 (yet, presumably, part 3 was written after parts 1 and 2, so links back to 1 and 2 could have been inserted). If one came across part 3 from a search, and landed on it for the first time, one just might want to start at part 1 and read forward.

> And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post?

Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

These days an awful lot of blogs don't have RSS feeds.

Especially blogs that are part of broader news publications, in my experience.

But yes you're right when there is a feed you can open that in Chrome and Ctrl+F, at least.

(Obviously my complaints come from blogs that don't have this. But also, opening an XML file isn't exactly user-friendly, and 99% of end users would never know to do it.)

But is it a blog if it doesn't have an RSS feed?

…okay sure, technically yes, but not one I will be able to follow, or remember to read until it pops up in someone else's aggregator or links in the future.

> These days an awful lot of blogs don't have RSS feeds.

That's not my experience.

> Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

Which has the 10 or 20 most recent posts, but not the post from 12 years ago. If it's a wordpress blog, you can use pagination tricks to get older posts, but, AFAIK, there's no standard way to say "Give me all of the posts" when fetching the RSS feed.

It is possible for feeds to support pagination and archives in a standardized manner: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3

Not very common though in my experience.

I sampled a few of my RSS feeds. Exactly zero of them implement this.

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