It's not the Screed, It's the Feed - Tennant: Digital Libraries

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Roy Tennant

It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
April 9, 2008

For some unknown reason, exactly a month ago my RSS feed stopped working. I only discovered it recently, when someone said something that made me check. As it turns out, a number of people simply thought I hadn't posted for a while since I wasn't showing up in their feed aggregator.

Lovely. Here I am, squeezing out pearls of wisdom like blood from a rock, and there's no one around to read them or comment. And why didn't I know this? I had noticed that comments had dropped off, but somehow it didn't occur to me that my feed was broken. I thought that I wasn't saying anything that was interesting or provocative, so I vowed to do better. Heck, I even got snarky about Thomas Mann's comments on WoGroFuBiCo. When you can't rile someone up with that you know you've dropped off the blogosphere.

The stark truth is that many people never see the web site that publishes a blog -- they read it in their feed aggregator that conveniently pulls in posts from all the blogs they've selected and nothing else. What's not to like about that? But it also means that if something happens to a feed, as it did to mine, that blog is dead to you. As I tried to say a couple years ago in a column called "Hustle and Flow", for systems like this it's all about the flow. Without it, you're like nothing. You're invisible. You're like me for the last month. And you don't need me to tell you just how wrong that would be.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. As of this writing the feed is STILL broken. Wonderful. Will the two of you who will see this post please wave? I'm feeling lonely.

Posted by Roy Tennant on April 9, 2008 | Comments (6)

Industries: News & Features

April 10, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
Alain Pierrot commented:

Hi, you have at least a regular reader from France, through the Library Journal .com. Keep posting!

April 10, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
Roy Tennant commented:

Thanks a lot for the wave, Alain. Now to find the other person reading my blog from the web site...

April 11, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
walt crawford commented:

Alain's not alone. The website can be a little strange sometimes, but...

April 14, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
Comment guy commented:

And Roy, keep in mind that the comment module, too, is broken in your blog software. It rejects comments at least as often as it takes them. Who has time to deal with that?

April 14, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
Comment guy commented:

And Roy, keep in mind that the comment module, too, is broken in your blog software. It rejects comments at least as often as it takes them. Who has time to deal with that?

May 12, 2008
In response to: It's not the Screed, It's the Feed
Peter Murray commented:

@Comment-guy: For what it's worth, I had a running conversation with folks from Library Journal's parent organization a few months back about the commenting problem. The short answer was that they knew about it but didn't know how it was happening.