Generally, it's hard to convince nerds that something trivial to them is not trivial to non nerds.<p>In what reality is it obvious that "to 'get more of something' I have to copy a url (what's a url?) from a browser tab to another web application?"<p>Before telling me that poeple just have to click the "feed icon", watch this: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ</a> and ask yourself if you think people will go from:<p>"I want more of this site" to "Why don't I click that funky little orange icon in the address bar?"
Does this actually solve the problem?<p>I mean they offer two text prompts "Follow this Blog" which makes me think that it will take me to twitter to follow them there, and "Subscribe" which makes me think mostly of email lists. I'd suggest something like "Track New Posts" or the like.<p>Ok let's assume that you can come up with text that actually makes people want to click it. The only help a user gets then is "Pick a service to subscribe to this page:" which could confuse the user into thinking it is some sort of update tracker for the particular page they are on. If a user doesn't recognize any of those services they won't even know what they are picking. There is no glossing, like say "Bloggtroter will let you get updates to this site, and your other favorite sites in email". Oh and they can't click on the sites (to say read about them) without setting a preference that is hidden. On that why have a separate settings page at all? Just have a "View All" button and if they click something else set that.<p>If you work through all that I'm still not certain the use case is actually better than what they get if they hit the RSS feed directly and styles and transforms are used.
You're being very defensive about the difficulty thing. How many times do I need to see that youtube link and a variation on "no seriously, it's too hard"?<p>It's not "very hard." Sure, some people don't get it, but then what are the chances they understand your modal? Surely the act of understanding how to set up and use an RSS client is more difficult than copying a link once you've done that.<p>In all the recent discussion around Reader and RSS, I haven't seen "too hard" as a primary concern from anyone.
<p><pre><code> function addHandler() {
navigator.registerContentHandler("application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed",
"http://your.feed.reader/add_feed?%s",
"feed reader name");
}
</code></pre>
If your feed reader provider does that, then when you land on a feed, Firefox will prompt you to add it to "feed reader name". Say yes and it will throw it at the URL it builds up (where %s gets replaced by the feed's URL).
Most elegant solution is Opera implementation [1] - a simple feed icon is displayed in the address bar if
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="<a href="http://www.example.com/rss" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/rss</a> />
is in the <head> section.<p>Other thing is dicoverability of that icon and learning what it does.<p>[1] I think Firefox does that too.
Until Firefox removed the location bar's RSS icon, that's exactly how I subscribed to feeds: click the icon and then click the "Subscribe in Google Reader" button that loaded. That might not have worked if I used a different client, though.
It is quite simple in Chrome. Just click on the RSS icon at the corner of the omnibox. Then there is a drop-down showing a list of RSS readers that you can subscribe with.<p>Can't think of anything simpler.