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# Low tech solutions to paywall problems
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2010/10/low_tech_solutions_to_paywall_problems/
- Published: 2010-10-01T09:16:54.000Z
- Updated: 2015-04-28T12:57:15.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: news international, paywalls, rss, The Times

I confess: for all my “meh” about paywalls, I currently have paid access to The Times’ new websites. There are a couple of bloggers I actively miss, and think \*might \*be worth the money. Yesterday, I spotted this on [Ruth Gledhill’s blog](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/articles-of-faith/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) \[paid subscription required, rather obviously\]:

\> 

A note from Ruth Gledhill 

Thank you for subscribing to The Times and reading this far. I have decided to become a human ‘RSS feed’. I will send out at least one daily email, sent blind to all recipients so no email addresses of other subscribers or commenters are revealed, of updates to the blog.

If I may be a little “internetty” for a moment: WTF?

This actually worries me more than anything else about the Great Paywall of Wapping. Not that Ruth is doing this – that shows a fabulous respect for her readers and understanding that a blog is a community – but the fact that there isn’t and RSS feed. It can’t be beyond the wit of their technical team to publish a feed that either was free to air, but only contained the link, a headline and perhaps an excerpt, or a full text feed that required authentication (and RSS readers have supported authentication for years).

With RSS apps starting to get some traction on mobile devices, this really betrays a deep lack of understanding somewhere in their organisation about how their most engaged – and therefore the most likely to pay – actually find their way to the content. 

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