Wordpress.com' RSS feeds suck
Update: since writing this post WordPress's feeds started validating. That needs to be pointed out because I've found the WordPress team is remarkably fast at listening to its users and implementing fixes and features. Yesterday at the Blog Business Summit …
Context & Ripple Effects
This post is the sharper half of a two-part critique from Microsoft's geek blogger during the Blog Business Summit week, alongside his broader complaint that RSS usability sucks across the board. The notable twist is the update: WordPress.com's feeds began validating almost immediately after the criticism, and the author credits a WordPress team that was, even in 2005, unusually fast at shipping user-requested fixes. A follow-up from Microsoft's team RSS blog days later dug into well-formed XML in feeds, turning a one-off gripe into an early standards-quality conversation between platforms.
First-order effects
- WordPress.com publishers were serving invalid feeds that broke aggregators and subscribers; the immediate fix restored correct output for every site on the hosted service without individual action.
- The criticism landed at the Blog Business Summit, where WordPress's public response speed became visible proof that its open, fast-moving development model could out-correct proprietary rivals.
Second-order effects
- Rival blogging platforms faced pressure to treat feed validity as a baseline feature rather than an afterthought, since prominent bloggers could now publicly benchmark them within hours.
- Microsoft's own RSS team engaging on well-formed XML signaled that platform vendors would increasingly police each other's implementations, raising the de facto bar for syndication interoperability.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open-source publishing infrastructure competes not just on features but on correction latency — a dynamic that, two decades later, underpins efforts like FAIR, the Linux Foundation-backed federated update network built by WordPress veterans to harden the ecosystem's supply chain.
- Feeds evolving into a governed, validated layer of web plumbing foreshadowed today's debates over who maintains the shared protocols that independent publishing depends on.
The trend: Open-source platforms are winning developer trust by turning public bug reports into near-instant fixes, gradually professionalizing the maintenance of shared web standards like RSS.