Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site.
We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.
I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after.
We are working on making sure this lands asap.
Paul
When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.
The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.
I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made.
Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.
> If you've ended up here, chances are you're looking to subscribe to our blog in your RSS feed.
> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.
Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?
> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.
RSS could be that solution!
I noticed the same for Google's site https://web.dev/
The last article pushed to the feed was "Changes to the web.dev infrastructure" few months ago https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration
The feed still there but with no updates https://web.dev/feed.xml and on the site you can see new articles published.
Is sad that on a infrastructure revamp of a modern site, the RSS feed was left out of the features list (at least for now).
Bramus, a google engineer did an inoffical workaround:
https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
People don't understand how much RSS is useful...
I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.
Solution found.
curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \
|sed -n '
1i\
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>\
<rss version="2.0">\
<channel>
s}\(<loc>\)\(.*\)\(</loc>\)}\
<item>\
<title>\2</title>\
<description>\2</description>\
<link>\2</link>\
</item>}p;
$a\
</channel>\
</rss>
'
NB. The public sitemap.xml still refers to an (unofficial?) RSS feed.
“Unfortunately” - c’mon it wasn’t an act of God that removed them
"Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for checking?)
They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.
Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.
Why don't we use Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and so on?
I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either.
Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.
I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.
Found this HN post via RSS...
It's worth noting that this new site replaces one that was just 3 years old, released in December 2020, here's the announcement of that version of the site: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome
Loss of the ability to contribute via GitHub pull request is unfortunate, hopefully there will be a better way to contribute again in the future.
Cue...
- commercial AI refusing to generate RSS XMLs from a webpages' content. - "illegal" AI that is willing to browse webpages without disclosing that their'e bots
I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.
Let me guess... so users are forced to load a web page which will show them ads that couldn't fit into RSS records?
Google, you helped kill widespread RSS adoption to begin with. You can't be trusted with anything technology.
'Google has stopped...', or 'Google no longer...', 'Google have removed'.
As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed, looks like it's time to get a new email provider (as well) .
@ yahoo seem to have few(er?) problems.
There are probably others. Can anyone recommend a good search engine?
Not sure if it counts as dev blog but https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ still has RSS and Atom feeds, I guess not everything got nuked.
https://kill-the-newsletter.com
please donate: https://patreon.com/leafac
To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!
I think this thread could good place to share services (self-hosted or paid) that allow to monitor site for changes and make rss/send notification.
Google's fight against open technologies continues.
RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.
Guess they don’t want people to read their pages.
It makes sense. After killing Google Reader making RSS less relevant helps to justify that as the right decision :)
Google is a joke how does something like this even happen
Sometimes I think the jokes about Google having no management are true.
Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.
*-in-cheek-on
Google management too busy doing evil
There's a ton of smart people working at Google. Just none in the management
Maybe they can find the code for reader somewhere on a backup disk?
The real crime is using Google tools/libraries
Wasn't Google planing to add some sort of RSS support in Chrome? Or did the experiment end as a failure?
which rss reader do you use?
Bard solvable?
what year is it
Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.
RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.
If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions.
[0]: https://monitoro.co
RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with.
AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it?
Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.
This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team?
In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally.
(Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.)
[1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss
[2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog
[3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2