Recently I was ranting about Google not providing RSS feed on their news site. It seems that they do listen to their users. Apparently enough people like me ranted, complained and sent them requests for them to cave in and add RSS and Atom feeds for each section of their news site. Awesome!
I have one complaint though… As of right now there is still no autodetection – which slightly annoys me. I really hope they fix this because every single other website in existence has feed autodetection enabled. The only people who do not do that, are amateurs who just discovered RSS and do not know better.
If Google decides not to add 3 or 4 lines of HTML to their header, they will be basically spitting Firefox, and various feed reader users in the face. I mean, how difficult is to do this:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Google News” href=”http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=h&amp;output=atom”>
There, I did your job for you. Now copy and paste this into your header for each feed you want to be autodetected by the browsers. Is it really that difficult? Geez…
Don’t get me wrong – it is a big improvement! The news search feed is really neat for example. I would love to see this implemented for all Google searches actually! But lack of autodetection is annoying and unprofessional. So in the end, I still get to say:
It’s 2005, get on with the friken program!
Let’s see how long will it take them to fix this.
Finally! Having news alerts e-mailed to me never really interested me but having them as an rss feed! Ahhh, thank you Google! And thank you for bringing them to my attention – going to add them to my feed reader now.
-Sean
WaywardPuppy.com
Yup! RSS is much easier because of it’s flexibility. For example, I have most of my favorite news sites set as live bookmarks in Firefox. This way I can just click on my toolbar to see the headlines from all these sites without ever visiting them.