RSS and webpages

Steve Mallett over at fooworks is wondering about webpages:

I write this and wonder… Will anyone read this via the fooworks.com webpage?

With the slow death of commenting systems due to spammers and their ilk, and it being in poor taste to only include snippets of a post in your feeds… what is the use of the page at all anymore?

It's certainly true — if we had better ways of discovering RSS feeds I could imagine a blog that didn't actually have a web page at all!

As it is, I think the page serves a few purposes:

• Discovery: providing a Web-indexable place to spider and to find the blog.
• Repository: it's good to keep an actual place to store related items (such as Steve's Foafinator — though I think it's very relevant that this is simply a slice into his blog categories!).
• Identity: I establish a theme, some background, and an aesthetic with my site. I export my thoughts through my feed, but to get the feel, see my currently-playing song, and look at my projects you have to come through the site.

I could conceive of a feed that puts some of this in (I've seen ones with some navigation elements embedded in the markup) — but once you put enough in, aren't you just serving up a webpage every 30 minutes?

I think I've rambled enough. Still, it's interesting to wonder if anyone would notice if your entire site apart from your RSS feed disappeared!

Posted at 2004-03-04 15:06:49 by Richard • Link to RSS and webpages