Is it typical to have non-blog site updates distributed as a feed? I have a blog page and a link aggregator page and I provide a feed for when the link aggregation page has updated. I just can’t tell if people ever use it like that?
Definitely! It doesn't hurt much to have more feeds. Sure, you don't want to advertise 100 feeds on each page but using it smartly can be very helpful for users. Some of the non-blog feeds I am subscribed to:
- Videos. (Basically the same use case as blogs though)
- Releases of various projects. (GitHub for example supports this)
- FeedBurner has a feed for problems detected in your feeds. (Although I don't use FeedBurner anymore)
- Hacker News posts on the front page with >400 points.
- A handful of Reddit searches.
- My Reddit inbox.
- A feed of WebMentions to my blog.
- A feed of packages that I maintain for nixpkgs that are out-of-date.
Really anything that someone may want to be notified about can be a useful feed. For example I can imagine a feed of price changes for a product so people can wait for it to go on sale.
The search feeds can be expensive for the site if they aren't careful. But between "materialized" and caching it can be made pretty cheap. If you are careful you can even make these work with WebSub. (If you run your own hub you can know what the subscriptions are and either run them periodically or actually check the queries against new items in real-time)
