Hi guys, my name's Mike and I am mildly addicted to RSS. OK, OK, I am HUGELY addicted to RSS. I'll agree that I was slow on the uptake, but lately I can't get away from it. The number of feeds I subscribe to is truly staggering.
Not all feeds are equal, however. Some are great, some are down-right frustrating.While I was contemplating an RSS-direct-brain interface, I came up with a list of tips to make up that fantastic feed.
The same goes for only having the title in the feed. The main reason I subscribe to a site's feeds is so that I don't have to visit the site. If I felt like to go to the site everyday I wouldn't have subscribed in the first place.
Include the full article if its not too big. Generally, if its not split into multiple pages on the site (or should be), you can include the whole thing. Otherwise have a good summary: enough to tell the reader what its about. They can decide whether to read more or not. Ain't It Cool's feed is a great example of this. One-liners are completely unacceptable.
If you're doing it just to get hits on your site counter - don't. Channel your feed through feedburner.com and keep track of your subscribers that way. Feedburner has a fantastic set of tools for tracking your subscribers (which has just gotten better) and will even allow your readers to subscribe via email
Multiple items or nothing. There's nothing more irritating than knowing that you missed a couple of feeds. Especially with comic feeds. The best part of my Mondays is reading the feeds I missed on the weekend. You never know how often your subscribers are checking so always include the last few feeds for them to catch up on.
Check that your feed only pops up as new when they've changed. Feed readers use the date fields on each item to determine whether its new or not so check that you're creating them properly. Some feeds are particularly bad and show up as new or unread every time you reload them. Continually marking them read is about as fun as continually biting a rhino. Eventually your readers will get irritated and ditch your feed altogether.
Most feed readers don't support the HTTP authentication that some sites use to protect their feeds. Basecamp is one such site. Unless your feed is really secret then stay away from this authentication method.
Put your feeds in your page's HTML block. Doing this makes browsers aware of feeds on your page. For each feed place this line between the and tags on your page.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="FeedTitle" href="URLtoFeed" />
Here's an example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmashingMagazine" />
Not all feeds are equal, however. Some are great, some are down-right frustrating.While I was contemplating an RSS-direct-brain interface, I came up with a list of tips to make up that fantastic feed.
Empty items are right out
The same goes for only having the title in the feed. The main reason I subscribe to a site's feeds is so that I don't have to visit the site. If I felt like to go to the site everyday I wouldn't have subscribed in the first place.
Include the full article if its not too big. Generally, if its not split into multiple pages on the site (or should be), you can include the whole thing. Otherwise have a good summary: enough to tell the reader what its about. They can decide whether to read more or not. Ain't It Cool's feed is a great example of this. One-liners are completely unacceptable.
If you're doing it just to get hits on your site counter - don't. Channel your feed through feedburner.com and keep track of your subscribers that way. Feedburner has a fantastic set of tools for tracking your subscribers (which has just gotten better) and will even allow your readers to subscribe via email
One item is just not on
Multiple items or nothing. There's nothing more irritating than knowing that you missed a couple of feeds. Especially with comic feeds. The best part of my Mondays is reading the feeds I missed on the weekend. You never know how often your subscribers are checking so always include the last few feeds for them to catch up on.
Bad dates
Check that your feed only pops up as new when they've changed. Feed readers use the date fields on each item to determine whether its new or not so check that you're creating them properly. Some feeds are particularly bad and show up as new or unread every time you reload them. Continually marking them read is about as fun as continually biting a rhino. Eventually your readers will get irritated and ditch your feed altogether.
Authenticate only as a last resort
Most feed readers don't support the HTTP authentication that some sites use to protect their feeds. Basecamp is one such site. Unless your feed is really secret then stay away from this authentication method.
Head's up
Put your feeds in your page's HTML block. Doing this makes browsers aware of feeds on your page. For each feed place this line between the and tags on your page.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="FeedTitle" href="URLtoFeed" />
Here's an example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmashingMagazine" />
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