For fifteen years, A List Apart has published long-form magazine articles written by the whip-smart web community (AKA you). But we don’t always have grand, 2,000-word arguments to make. Sometimes we just want to tell you about a new technique, share an article, or post a quick note.
And that’s what you’ll see here: short posts and interesting links from our staff and contributors.
You got blog in my RSS
A few of you noted that your RSS readers have been heaving under the weight of the new ALA. Don’t worry! We had some RSS hiccups during launch. Expect about a blog post or two a day, more or less, from here on out.
Starting now, you can also select from two RSS subscription options:
- All content, which includes articles from our issues (usually two articles every other Tuesday), columns like this one from Karen McGrane (about once a week), and our blog posts.
- Articles and columns only, without the blog posts.
A word from our sponsors
If this redesign says anything, it’s that we care about reading—and we don’t want advertising (or anything else) to get in the way.
That won’t change.
But we do need to cover our costs—mostly paying our staff and contributors a small honorarium for their countless hours of work—so we’re going to start including a sponsor on our RSS feed. (If you read Daring Fireball, it’ll look a lot like that.) Much like The Deck ads we already run on ALA, we’ll only accept sponsors that offer something we think is relevant, and it’ll never be intrusive.
Have a blog post idea?
The best way to tell us is to tweet it @alistapart.
Please only e-mail us about feature article submissions—we can only sift through our inbox a couple times a week, and we don’t want your awesome idea to get lost in a pile of press releases.
Also, please, please don’t send us any more press releases.
The links in the RSS feed are bust it seems, as they are “All content” which, because the RSS feed is served from FeedProxy, is giving the wrong link.
Some blog posts are simply link posts, and are meant to link directly to the external article.
Thanks for separating the feeds. Now I can get what I want and only what I want. It makes the redesign a bit more palatable.
There seems to be no option to subscribe to the non-blog list specifying the Safari web browser. All I want is to see a wee number on my browser menu bar opposite RSS when I have a new feed, and then be able to click and link to the page when I have a moment. I don’t want a separate Feed reader, I don’t want to read the text of the feed separate from the page, and I certainly don’t want more than one feed a week. It used to be like that. After all this self-congratulation about your idiotic redesign, you seem to have screwed up on the functionality too.
@David — I’m unsure what you mean by “option to subscribe … specifying the Safari web browser.”
The new feed is available for auto-discovery as normal, via
linktags in the header of the HTML, but that does nothing for the latest versions of Safari (which no longer support RSS), so following the direct link in this blog post (http://alistapart.com/site/abridged-rss) should open the feed in your default RSS reader (or, if you use a web-based reader, you’ll have to copy and paste that address over).We’ve done nothing to change the fundamental behavior of the feeds.
I love the blog idea! I check ALA frequently for new articles, so it’s nice there will be some new content during the down times.
For what it’s worth, I read your launch articles and was excited when I heard that there would be frequent updates. However, I’ve checked back many times since the launch and it wasn’t until today that I realized that the new content was beneath the fold.
It would be nice if there was a way I could type in ALA in my browser and instantly know if there was new content, or at least how to get to the blog.
Anyways, keep up the good work. Reading the new ALA has been a joy on my iPhone 4, retina iPad, and retina 15″ macbook.
OK Tim, I managed (I think) to add the new abbreviated RSS feed to my old version of Safari (my standard machine uses Snow Leopard). The problem was when I clicked on one of the links. The change in RSS feed behaviour I mentioned (whole articles in the feed) is over the last year, rather than with the revamp. The other thing I dislike is with some of the associated discussions one only has the choice of replying through Facebook (not over my dead body), Twitter (rhymes with sh…..) or my Blog (last used several years ago). Why do I have to go through third parties whom I dislike to talk to you?
@David — I’d be interested to know what exactly you mean only being able to reply via Twitter or Facebook… aren’t you replying with an ALA account right now?