Feed Me

Sunday, 30 April 2006

One of the small things I struggle with is how long to assume you, the reader, have been reading this site, and how much attention you’ve been paying along the way. There are certain points I probably ought to be repeating more frequently.

One small example regards this site’s RSS feeds — I get a couple of emails a month suggesting that I offer a full-content feed, or that I should include my Linked List entries in the site’s feed. Such readers are unaware that I do offer feeds with full-article content and Linked List entries — but they’re available only to Daring Fireball members.

So, let this serve as a reminder for those of you who’ve forgotten or were unaware. When you sign up for a membership, you get a unique “key”. You can then subscribe to the members-only feeds using your email address as your username and your membership key as your password.

I should also mention that I’ve added a third members-only feed: a combination feed encompassing both the full-content and Linked List feeds. Those of you who are subscribed to both the full-content and Linked List feeds might want to subscribe to this one instead.

I wrote two years ago when I introduced the membership program: “Please, I implore you, do not think of this as paying $20 just to get a full-content RSS feed. Think of it as a small token of my gratitude for supporting my writing at this site. It’s like when you pledge $100 to PBS and they send you a tote bag; no one does it to get the tote bag.”

It does seem, though, that the members-only feeds are pretty good “tote bags”: about 70 percent of all current members are subscribed to at least one of the members-only feeds.