Provide More With Your RSS
22nd July 2007
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is used to provide a subscription for your websites visitors to stay informed of your latest artciles, news, blog postings etc. RSS is a universal format menaing that the "Feed" can be read by many different applications such as your web browser as live bookmarks, some email clients or dedicated RSS readers (or aggregators). In its simplest form the RSS Feed provides an updated link to a new page of content on your website.
Subscribing to RSS by using the Live Bookmarks feature such as in Mozilla Firefox may be handy for some, but as your collection of feeds grow this method becomes inefficient so it may be better to move to a dedicated RSS Reader, one choice is Liferea. With a dedicated RSS reader you will be able to get automatic updates of content from all websites where you subscribe to their Feed, and should be able to read the article from their website directly in your RSS Reader. There is a problem, many RSS feeds are basic and only provide a link to the new content and sometimes a little intro. This is a complete annoyance as RSS Feeds can very easily send the content through to a feed reader without the user ever having to visit the website from which the feed came. It seems that the "Simple" in the RSS acronym is not simple enough, or maybe just too much effort! Why should we have to leave our RSS Reader's and open our Web Browser's just the read the article? Well the short of it is I expect people usually don't bother.
RSS is a simple and powerful tool when used to its potential as it provides a way for your content to be read away from the web browser, making your websites content accessible for more than one application group. If your websites content is public and written for your visitors, it seems madness not to provide alternative ways for your visitors to enjoy your content.
A simple example of a bad RSS Feed is shown below...
I think this makes it clear. You can see the new feed and have a one line description about the article. From this one line we will decide whether to open our web browsers to read the whole article or just pass by it. It may be the most interesting article you have ever read but you are left with an intro paragraph to make the decision to read it. Mostly this little description has to be very good to convince you to open your web browser's to read it!
How about this example instead...
Its clear the difference. You have the whole article in your RSS Reader and you do not have to open your web browser or go anywhere, You can read it right here, right now! If all RSS Feeds were constructed like this then productivity will increase as you will be able to consume more information more quickly. Seeing as most people do not have a lot of time to read web articles this would be extremely helpful!