if you don't provide rss you don't respect my time or my intelligence
i use a variety of sites and need a way for all of their information to come to me. just like email—i need a universal inbox. i don’t have time to login to every site i use to refresh, just to see if there’s new content there.
if your site doesn’t provide rss it doesn’t allow me to care more about content on your site in a way that works like i do. it’s tremendously shortsighted to think that funneling me back to your web site is the only way to get some kind of return on the service you’re providing to me. put ads in your feeds, whatever. realize that if i care enough to subscribe i’m going to come to the site more than an average user would anyways. pull your head out of the sand, now.
also, some sites consciously choose not to provide an rss feed because they don’t want to encourage the cesspool that over-subscribing to rss feeds can become. i’m sorry if some people tend to treat rss like crack cocaine instead of a hammer or a friendly robot, but that’s their problem. don’t punish me because of some potential misuse.
if your site has syndicated feeds for any updating content i might care about, good stuff. but also know that, in just 1 or 2 years, everything i wrote above releated to rss or atom will also apply to having a restful api, so get cracking and beat the curve.
