[charlieok]

So they've got “articles”, “blog posts”, “link posts”, “columns” and a number of “topics”. They're “publishing more frequently—a lot more frequently”.

Fantastic! So why do I just see one “RSS” link in the footer pointing to http://alistapart.com/site/rss ?

Are they turning on the fire hose without giving users any way to control what content/topic/author they subscribe to? And these guys are the shining exemplars of site design and “content strategy”?

My feed reader just blew up with a slew of “new” entries from alistapart.com, apparently a result of their new platform not properly handling the identifiers from posts used on their previous platform.

I understand Zeldman & Co to be champions of web standards. RSS (and its sibling rival, Atom) is still the best decentralized way to subscribe to updates on the web that I know of. So why is their site apparently treating it with such little regard?

Am I going to have to unsubscribe because they overwhelm me with stuff in their feed with no good option for fine-tuning?

[recuter]

I've had that happen countless times with different feeds, it is very rarely on purpose because as you say it leaves a bad taste.

For now, I'd chuck it up to a one-off snafu.

[charlieok]

Yeah, that's merely an annoying thing that seems to crop up occasionally with RSS.

My main frustration here is not finding a menu of feed options; instead, I just see one big site-wide feed.

I've had this frustration with many sites, and it's kept me from following things I otherwise would have followed. I'm just much more mystified when the entire aim of the site is “web design, by web designers, for web designers”.