Monday, July 24, 2006

This Week In Tech - no rss/xml icons??

If you're a regular listener of This Week In Tech, you'll probably know that they've recently done a redesign of their site. It looks much much better, but there is one problem.

Now maybe it's too early on a Monday morning and I've just got to give my head a shake, but it seems to me that subscribing to the Twit series of shows on this site is a pain for someone like me who uses a plain-jane podcasting client like iPodder. I've recently re-installed it on my linux box (btw interestingly it's still called 'iPodder' in linux and NOT 'Juice') and had to resubscribe to a few shows like Floss Weekly.

If you visit the site, you will NOT see the ubiquitous 'xml' or 'rss' chicklet for the show's feed (or any of the show's feeds). I usually right-click this to copy the address to the feed and paste it into my aggregator.

No. Instead they have a 'Subscribe..' drop down box which lists all the subscriptions mechanisms ('I-Tunes, Odeo, etc..) and at the bottom you will see 'rss'. That's great. But I can't right-click that entry in the drop down list to copy the address (at least I couldn't) and when I select 'rss' I get the xml document tree representation that everyone calls 'scary'.

The only way I can copy the feed address is to click 'rss' from the dropdown list, ignore the document tree page and copy the feed link in the address bar of my browser when the document tree is showing.

Is this a good solution??? C'mon guys. We shouldn't have to do this to subscribe. NOT everyone uses I-Tunes. Give me some direct link to the feed address somewhere on your page that I can copy and paste. You should know better. For shame Leo.

2 comments:

mem said...

Hey, I came across your blog during a random Inkscape search and stopped for the photography lessons.

Thanks!

mem said...

(This is the third try; I am being defeated by the captcha. I hope that it comes up just once!)

I came across your blog on a random Inkscape search and stayed for the photo lessons. I appreciate them--thanks for the good work.