Steam supports feed readers! (RSS)
I've been advocating for RSS (and you should too!), and was ready to send Steam support a message asking them to add RSS to their website.
But low-and-behold they already have it!
If you visit the Trackmania News page, there's a 'Links' dropdown, where you can select 'RSS'. Then you can 'Share' that page with your feed reader app (or copy+paste the url).
Well, this is so-so. The main page for TM SHOULD have HTML markup so that feed reader apps can auto-detect all available feeds. The 'News' page should also have markup for this.
Also, the feeds on steam give a title of the app id (not the game's name), and they provide the steam icon rather than the game's icon.
So I wrote a different email.
I'm excited anyway, bc now I have a good way to read up on Trackmania updates. I just didn't bother before. Now I might actually care!
But yeah, I hope they improve their RSS support. We'll see what they say!
This was my message:
Your website has RSS (atom) feeds for news updates about games, which is fantastic! For example, if you visit https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1972440 there is an 'RSS' link which can be used by my feed reader app so I can get updates about shotgun king.
Can you make the following improvements to the website for RSS support?
- On the news page for games (example linked above), add HTML markup identifying the RSS Url, so that feed reader apps can automatically detect the feed url.
- On the main page for a game (i.e.https://store.steampowered.com/app/1972440/Shotgun_King_The_Final_Checkmate/), add HTML markup identifying all available feeds, so feed reader apps can automatically detect them. I see there are feeds already available for 'Read related news' and 'View update history', but they are not listed in the markup and cannot be auto-detected from the main store page for the game.
- Add feeds for discussions and the workshop. Individual feeds for each discussion would be neat too.
- Give feeds an appropriate title and description.https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/1972440/?cc=US&l=english provides the title '1972440 RSS Feed', but should give 'Shotgun King News' (or something like it). The Description is similar.
- Give feeds an appropriate icon. Currently, it looks like all feeds just use the steam icon, whereas they should use the icon of the game. The atom spec supports 'icon' and 'logo' and I'm not sure which is correct, or if both should be used.
Thank you for considering these improvements!
Have a great day!