If Straight Dope is fighting ignorance, why doesn’t the main site have an RSS feed?
I’ll take “False Dilemmas” for 500, Alex.
Dunno. We’re asked for it but it’s not there yet. We’re hopeful that will change at some point.
It was working as recently as 5/3/2009, that’s when I received the most recent feed.
On the main page of the website?
sorry, i misunderstood. No, on the forums of the SDMB.
RSS invites hundreds of thousands of people to have their computer ping your server every couple of minutes so they can have the latest info, with none of the ads. Massive additional traffic, no additional benefit.
Remember, the SDMB is not a profitable business. It might break even, or it might not. CNN it ain’t.
Nice opinion you’ve got there. I suppose this is why RSS became popular.
Unless, of course, you include the ads in the downloaded articles.
http://page2rss.com/page?url=www.straightdope.com/ appears to be a usable RSS feed. Cheesegrater + Portalizer used to have a feed, but it was recently shut down.
Lest anyone be mislead by LSLGuy, serving RSS isn’t quite the terror he makes it out to be. First, no RSS aggragator should be checking more frequently than hourly. Second, many people are using web aggragators like Google Reader or Bloglines; such a service actually decreases the number of RSS downloads as the site downloads the RSS once for all users, not once per user. Third, the cost to serve an RSS feed is negligible, especially since most readers will use a cheap optional request to only retrieve the full feed if it has changed. Trust me, compared to say, a forum system, serving an RSS feed is trivial. Fourth, as ultrafilter notes, nothing stops you from serving ads in your feed. Finally, you can offload your RSS to sites like Feedburner who, last I heard, still had a free option. Feedburner is willing to do it for free because the cost is so very low. Setting up an RSS feed will take some time, and may be a nuisance if you rolled your own content management system. But beyond the price to initially set it up, it’s pretty much all good for the publisher.