Time to Upgrade
Dave Winer must be the only guy on the planet with a newsreader that can't handle Atom:
I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn't RSS, to which I ask -- why??
Do you want to lose subscribers?
Because that's what happened. I can't read your feed anymore Ted. I'll survive, but I will miss your posts.
I've never been a huge fan of Atom (although, as I posted awhile back, I fully understand why it exists) - but it's not as if it's hard to find a tool that handles RSS and Atom.
Comments
Heh
[Byron] January 30, 2007 16:59:10.296
I couldn't tell you what percentage of feeds are Atom vs. RSS vs. Flying Monkeys and that's just the way I like it. Thanks to the advent of "RSS" buttons in address bars I don't even have to poke around for the stupid subscribe link.
Atom 1.0 Support
[Rogers Cadenhead] January 30, 2007 21:19:37.540
I'm not aware of any newsreader outside of Radio UserLand and Manila that doesn't support Atom 1.0 (I don't use any of the other tools that come from the UserLand codebase).
[Gordon Weakliem] January 30, 2007 22:07:51.153
The overall proportion is pretty large, if you include Atom 0.3, thanks to Blogger. I believe Atom is the default format for LiveJournal as well.
Dave can blame himself
[Asbjørn Ulsberg] January 31, 2007 7:06:27.220
The only reason Dave can't read Atom feeds is because his software doesn't support it. And the reason it doesn't is politically based, not technically. He could also choose other software, but this is again ruled out because of politics. If he could just stop his political tirade, his software would support it and he could have changed a feed reader to something that is actually maintained and developed like it's 2007 and not 1997.
[Elliotte Rusty Harold] January 31, 2007 7:42:00.161
I know at least one minor aggregator site that I read can't handle Atom, but it's a two-person shop and they're swamped with work so they haven't gotten around to upgrading. There'll always be little corner cases like this. Sooner or later they'll upgrade when more and more of the feeds they want to aggregate are no longer available in RSS.
Time to Reconsider
[Mark Woodman] January 31, 2007 14:05:17.071
It's a tough spot to be in when you have to ask people to NOT use a data format, rather than just support it.
My copy of Microsoft Word can open .doc, .html, .rtf, .txt, .wri, .wpd., .wps, .xml ... Can you imagine if Microsoft said, "Please don't create documents in anything other than .doc format. Do you want to lose [readers]?"
It will be interesting to see the tipping point where Dave realizes that Atom support in Userland isn't admitting defeat, just that there's more than one way to feed your readers.