Posted on 2024-08-19
About a year ago now, I was working on plugging our new developer documentation system into our translation system. It was a bit of work, and we had to put in some really ugly workarounds due to a lacking feature in how the translation system could handle files.Cut to last week, when I find out that they actually added in the feature I needed last month. I asked our translation team lead how she found out about this, and she said she gets sent emails about changes.
That's great! Email is a wonderful way to inform people of changes like these. Unfortunately, it's a closed list, so I can't easily subscribe to it. Imagine my joy, though, when I found out that the company actually publishes their entire changelog on their help center. Fantastic! Now all I need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and...
Oh.
RSS is a boring technology. I don't mean this disparagingly, I mean it in the best possible way. RSS is simple and easy to plug in to any existing publishing system. You can subscribe to feeds any number of ways such as using a terminal reader like Newsboat (highly recommended) or even by fetching feeds into a Slack channel (very much not recommended). The point is that RSS is something every site should add. When I was asked how we could improve how we inform users of changes to our products, it was my first and only suggestion.
My life would be so easy if I could just create a folder in my feed reader for product updates relating to all tools I maintain at work. I could easily keep an eye on what I need to update and change. But no. RSS isn't sexy enough for some people, I suppose.