Another Feed Bites the Dust

Semi-rant, possibly not even fair but I am vexed nonetheless.

Another week, another RSS Feed bites the dust. I’m a fan of RSS - a single page where all your news is aggregated without any ads? Bliss. And the standardised machine-readable format is trivial for sharing and reposting news to aggregators such as Reddit. No wonder the entire podcast industry is built on it.

So it was with annoyance that another feed exhibited a little warning triangle in my FreshRSS install this morning. The ISSF have a shiny new website!

It’s very efficient, the entire front page fits on a single line:

I have nothing against a facelift - the ISSF website was looking very stale indeed. Unfortunately this particular example uses a custom-coded approach with no niceties like RSS, robots.txt nor even a sitemap that I could locate (weird how many don’t these days). It also fails to host any results pre-2015. Hopefully a case that they haven’t finished migrating data - not that they intend to abandon historic results entirely.

It also has a major accessibility fail with an interesting black-on-blue low-contrast font choice. I’m sorry (no I’m not), but accessibility testing is basic stuff. It’s not optional. This is really disappointing from a global governing body.

Okay, I’ll concede that’s not entirely fair - the accessibility isn’t too bad - you can navigate the site okay with a keyboard. I haven’t tried it with a screen reader, but it’s not an impenetrable blob of javascript like the British Shooting website. There are actual hrefs and Google stands half a chance of indexing it! In fact, catchpoint’s testing tool actually rates them 95/100 for accessibility. The one thing that gets flagged is the colour contrast in some places - which is nonetheless a weird and lazy thing to miss.

They’ve obviously been taking notes from the IOC, whose website at Olympics.com also has no RSS and is a nightmare to script against. This is really weird considering that it is clearly backed by a CMS and can split articles out based on tags such as sport or athlete - but there’s no corresponding RSS feed.

This is possibly by design, since they have a “Favourite” button where you can click a heart against individual sports. However, instead of setting a simple cookie that would customise the news to highlight your preferred events, it instead directs you to sign up for a “Free Olympic Membership” which promises live streaming, access to exclusive Olympic news and the chance to “Follow your favourites and get stories that matter to you”. I can only presume that they are selling your data to their sponsors and advertising partners. All of that could be more easily achieved without the hassle of collecting and securely (hopefully!) storing personal data.

And so continues the sad silo-isation of the internet, instead of being publicly readable with a variety of clients.

For the love of god. RSS is a stable format and there are lots of libraries if you’re building something from scratch instead of modifying a CMS. Please publish RSS. Please.