Published 2024-12-20
tag(s): #email #blogging #meta
I was reading a post in the Emacs subreddit that asked about RSS feeds. Someone said "extra
plus if you enable RSS with full articles".
About an hour later, it hit me: I do share full posts in RSS, but my recently added "reply by
email" link is not included in the feed.
And worst of all...this was by design. Because I was cutting the posts markup at the horizontal ruler, instead of the closing tag of the body. It made sense not to include links to navigate the site in each RSS post. But then I added the reply link in the same section, and used Feedly to test the feed and realized the "Back to top" button made some sense.
I ended up making two changes.
I modified the text in the link from "Back to homepage" to "Go to homepage". In all existing
pages.
It is a silly, small, change, but the new text works the same if you came from the Recent list
in the homepage, or if you opened a post in an RSS reader.
Ahhh, bikeshedding :)
Now the three links at the bottom of each page are included in the RSS feed. So someone
could potentially email me directly from their RSS reader.
It is another minor change, but if the point
of adding the email link was to
reduce the barrier to reply, including the link to do so in the RSS is no-brainer.
This reminded me of an anecdote I shared about how I built something without "clear requirements". In this case, I made a design decision to leave an element out of the feed, and then added something that needs visibility to said element. Very clearly contradicting my earlier decision, and forgetting to revisit the assumptions made earlier in "the project"
Again, be gentle to your users and product owners. Or business analyst, or whatever the title
in your org.
This site has the scope of a peanut, yet I fumbled two "design decisions" so far...