I headed over to ClickZ earlier this evening to read an article by Mike Grehan. It was a great article, and I hadnt actually been to ClickZ in awhile - so I decided to check around and see if they had added an RSS option so that I could add them to my daily browsing.

Sure enough, at the very bottom of the page next to teeny tiny print I found an RSS button:

I honestly had to hunt it down, but you wanna know the kicker? It wasnt linked. I clicked on it a couple of times just to be sure. Hmmm, that’s odd. So I just opened up FeedDemon and put in the URL to the site, and figured I’d use the “auto discovery” feature to find their feed.

Guess what? “Auto-Discovery not supported” Nice…

(It gets worse)

So I head back to the site to figure this out. There has to be an option to subscribe if they have an orange button, right? Back to the very, very bottom of the page and I have to actually read the small print there around the buttons ( ). The only thing that even looks remotely promising is a small link with the text “click here to see the list“.

So I click the link, and sure enough there are subscription options. SIX, to be exact - and you have to subscribe to all six of them to ‘get it all’. There is no main feed. Considering they dont support auto-discovery, and you have to copy and paste all six of the feed URL’s into your feed reader… I just clicked the back button. (Too much work!)

I’m back at the article at this point, and assume since it is an RSS enabled website that there must be a commenting system. I search around the page for that, and find a link at the top of the article by Mike that says “Read Feedback”.

There we go - I click that link to read the comments on Mike’s article. It’s at this point that my frustration level hits max… because what I find on that page is just general feedback. Actually it’s just a long list of RED links that practically blind me when I click through, and I had to actually read several of them to figure out I’d been derailed yet again. Grrr — “back”.

(You actually have to EMAIL them your feedback. How primitive is that?!)

The article was great, by the way. In fact, most of the content at ClickZ.com is exceptional. So sorry for the rant - I guess I’m just spoiled

Tags: clickz, mike grehan, rss