Get with the times!
I wondered the same thing. Many people, myself included, are switching to RSS-centric way of browsing. I suggested the main SD site to a friend and he asked for the RSS feed – I was really surprised that I couldn’t find an official one (just unofficial feeds). I think there is a growing segment of people that won’t read a site that doesn’t have a feed. Likewise the convenience of RSS feeds, means that some of these same people are likely to add the SD feed to their reader and get hooked. It is easier to get a friend interested in a new site this way then if you just email them a link and say “Check out this site periodically and see if you like it”.
And if the issue is ad-space, a lot of sites include the ads in their feeds.
BTW, since the SDMB re-enabled RSS feeds, I’ve become much more active on the boards than I had been.
We don’t know why the developers of the rest of the site have not enabled feeds. The board staff has no control over it.
A quick google brought this up. It’s on a site called page2rss and it certainly looks like they have an rss feed to the Dope front page.
Yes, just click RSS under Subscribe to Feed on the right hand side and away you go. Works just fine. (There are also SD feeds for Twitter, etc).
Wow, hadn’t seen that before. Thanks.
Sorry for the triple post but reading CaveMike’s post again I do see that he mentions unofficial feeds. Is there a real difference bewteen official/unofficial though if both bring the daily columns up?
Well, only slightly. The unofficial feed won’t be updated as promptly as the official feed (if one were to exist), since a third party has to periodically scrape the Straight Dope website. Who knows how often page2rss checks the site for updates? Could be once a day, or once an hour, or once a minute. Also, Creative Loafing is probably missing out on ad revenues from ads they could be inserting into an official feed. Needless to say, unofficial feeds would either strip out the ads, and/or possibly insert their own.
For now, I’m content to use this page2rss feed. If the Straight Dope webmasters ever get their act together and add an official RSS feed, I’ll probably switch to that.
It also depends what the unofficial feed scrapes. I am using one from cheezegrater which does not include all of the content from page2rss (e.g. Weird Earl’s).
Well, it looks like page2rss is down, perhaps permanently. Can anyone recommend a replacement online service? (Or better yet, could the Straight Dope tech staff please finally provide an RSS feed?)