Why not add RSS feeds?
Yesterday I suggested that one of my most frequently visited sites, Stormrage Server Progression, added RSS feeds. It took Kalroth about 12 hours from I suggested it in the site forums until he had it implemented. And not only the feed I asked for, but a couple of other feeds that were even better than what I asked for.
Over one year ago I signed up for a site called Shelfari which is a book reading community. It lets you add books you’re reading and rate and discuss and collect books you’ve already read. This information would be a nice addition to the “life stream” on my site. Imagine my surprise when I found out they doesn’t have RSS feeds! At the same time I joined, we added a request in their forums, and it even got replied to a couple of times by developers. Still, a year later, Shelfari doesn’t offer any kind of RSS feeds.
This is the love/hate thing about Internet and developers. I love that a person on his spare time creates a site like Server Progression, which basically is a World of Warcraft site that tracks down which guilds have killed which bosses on a particular server, and I love that he can be more friendly, more service minded and keep a better product than Shelfari. At the same time I hate that Shelfari, which is an Amazon acquired commercial site, fails to deliver simple features like feeds, which is one of the core functionalities of the web today.
So I’ve used Readernaut (still in beta) for tracking what books I read. It’s not as pretty, but it works as it should.