Missing Link still missing

What with Troppo being down all weekend, I wasn’t able to work on Missing Link, because I couldn’t access my blogroll. However, once Jacques restored the blog to the land of the living, yesterday I set about logging all 150-odd blogs into Google Reader. I’d been meaning to do it for ages, because it should make the job of compiling Missing Link significantly quicker and easier. It’s not a perfect solution, however, because there are quite a few blogs that simply don’t have a functioning RSS or similar feed. Mostly these are older Blogspot sites; although Blogger now offers a range of feed options, so presumably the bloggers that don’t have them simply haven’t bothered to update. Surprisingly there are a couple of quite prominent and newer sites that don’t seem to have feeds either, as far as I can tell. Andrew Norton is the most obvious. I’ll endeavour to remember to check his blog manually for updates each time I do Missing Link, because he’s a prominent “A” list blogger whose work needs to be abstracted in any “blog current awareness” service worth taking seriously. Nevertheless it’s a damn nuisance and I certainly won’t be able to manually check more than a couple of non-RSS blogs.

Accordingly, the general situation is that if you don’t have a functioning RSS or similar feed, your blog almost certainly won’t appear in Missing Link. That probably won’t worry most people, but the fact remains that if your blog doesn’t have a RSS feed, you’re almost certainly missing out on lots of readers anyway. A significant proportion of serious blog readers nowadays rely on feed readers, and almost never manually surf the web looking for blog posts, so if you don’t give them a feed subscription option they simply won’t read your blog.

Finally, the WYSIWYG visual editor feature here at Troppo seems to have disappeared in the course of Jacques’ repair work. It’s very fiddly and time-consuming to prepare Missing Link in the absence of a visual editor, and I don’t have the spare time any more what with being back at work after annual leave. Thus Missing Link won’t be appearing again until the visual editor is reinstalled. Sorry about that.

About Ken Parish

Ken Parish is a legal academic, with research areas in public law (constitutional and administrative law), civil procedure and teaching & learning theory and practice. He has been a legal academic for almost 20 years. Before that he ran a legal practice in Darwin for 15 years and was a Member of the NT Legislative Assembly for almost 4 years in the early 1990s.
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Robert
17 years ago

Andrew Norton does have a feed: http://www.andrewnorton.info/blog/feed/

As a general rule, any WordPress based blog will have a feed if you tack /feed/ on the end of the address.

Robert
17 years ago

Actually, would you mind listing some of the non-RSS sites you have in mind? It may be that someone can point to a feed that isn’t obvious, and failing that I’m sure those bloggers will set up a feed if they know you’re considering them for inclusion.

Robert
17 years ago

Happy to help, Ken.

I’ve never really liked feed readers. I have a routine that involves clicking down my list of bookmarks, and I like visiting actual websites. I find it really hard to get used to reading blogs as if they were emails.