Just a simple poll to get an idea of how popular RSS feed readers are
Since I just added RSS feeds to GL forum.

I am not really sure what it is. I remember setting up a blog once, and there was a setting to make it available for an rss feed, but never found out what exactly it did.

From what I know is websites can have RSS feeds which are just links to XML of feeds (news tidbits).
And then you get a RSS reader or use an online one and you have an account and you add RSS feed links from any site to your collection.
Feeds are like items that show up similar to emails where you can read and mark them as read or star them to refer back later.
I thought i would add that to my forum so people that don't feel like going to the site all the time can just see feeds of active posts where it's mostly text and they can just mark them as read as the see them without having to go to the forum.
And only go to the forum to reply to those posts otherwise they can just passively follow what's going on.

For your blog if people had your RSS feed added to their reader. Everytime you post a new blog post they can see it on their RSS feed reader...and i guess they can read it mark it as read, or if it really interests them then they might follow the link to your blogpost and comment on it.

Well, that sounds pretty complicated!

RSS reminds me of notebook computers that had infrared transceivers for a decade or more. Unfortunately nobody had ever met anybody that actually used the infrared port.
If you don't use RSS yourself and have prospered without it, that seems like a reason not to implement it on your site.

Yes, I do ... for many years already.
May seem oldfashioned nowadays ..but I really like it to be up to date with blogs and forums.

Not true. Great cause of mirth in meetings. The port was either on left or right side of the computer and would only communicate with another PC in line-of-sight. So you had 50% chances to be seated next to someone with a "mating" receiver. Since they were enabled by default, the other PC was listening to yours. The principle of the game was to disable yours at the beginning, and enable it later in the meeting. Connection would make the other PC chirp. So its owner would try to figure out what was happening and if s/he used a mouse, his/her wrist would cover the IR port causing it to disconnect with another chirp, but if s/he left the mouse for the keyboard it would chirp again.

Also, before Bluetooth I had a phone that would use IR to communicate with a PC.



Site owners love to add bells and whistles, overlooking the maintenance nightmare this can become. Also, RSS is meant for things that don't update too often, like blogs. On a forum updates are permanent.

Bells and whistle that's exactly what they are ...

I follow a range of RSS feeds from different sources (there are excellent mobile RSS feed readers) and I have also utilized RSS feeds for a range of services I run for people to keep up with the latest. It's a very simple thing to implement (it's basically just a public text file you append to) and a great way to automate news flow from projects.
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Griatch

At the moment we have 4 readers or 40% of respondents using RSS. Thats an impressive result. With a couple more participants we could find the majority if GC users also use RSS.

Well, it is missing a 5th choice, which would get a majority of votes: "RSS? WTF is that?"

hahahha lol!

Please revote as I just added a 5th choice.