Do You RSS?
I'm a latecomer to all this RSS malarkey, and I don't know what I'm doing.
Well, that can't be entirely true because my feed seems to work, but I do have some questions about what you actually do with your RSSs; how do you read them, and what should I offer in mine? Is anybody even reading it?
I have had an RSS feed for the past few weeks, but I have no idea if it's working for you. How do you read your RSS feeds? The only RSS readers I have used are Firefox and Trillian, and they both kinda suck.
So how do you want to read my feed - full feeds in some fancy reader, or titles with summaries and links to the entry on my site? Can I put images and Flash into a full feed, or is that wrong?
Does your reader highlight entries that change? And does this mean that the comment summary at the bottom of the entries in the current feed good or bad? Should I just split the comments out into comment feeds like everyone else seems to do?
And as for diary content, the next thing I'll be adding are categories. I want to split my diary in two, for personal and technical - I have a lot to say in both, but I am aware that a lot of my friends and visitors are probably only going to be interested in one or the other ;)
Comments
RSS is a great idea in theory. The problem is that it's one of those technologies that's great in theory, but people are confused by the range of RSS readers out there. When I first got into RSS reading, I just wanted a little thing that sat on the screen somewhere out of the way, and just scrolled through all the RSS feeds I was subscribed to. If I spotted a headline I wanted to read, I could click on it, and it'd open the right webpage.
This sort of thing didn't exist when I was looking around, so I wrote one myself. Looking around today, there are lots of readers out there, and they're all offering new ways of doing things, but I think they're missing out on the simplicity of RSS and trying to make more of it than it actually is.
That said, there's a bunch of stuff that RSS doesn't support, like proper authentication which is actually a little annoying.
What we really need is what is something like the email / browser client markets - a few mainstream leaders and then smaller projects with a smaller marketshare. Currently we've got lots of readers all with a more or less equal marketshare, and therefore none of them get enough market momentum to actually have some serious development work put behind them. They're all trying to be 'different' to each other by putting in new ideas and features, most of which are crap.
I just use my own one, so I'm guilty of almost the same thing though....
I'm reading your feed. To be honest, if you had a fulltext feed I'd probably read MORE of your stuff though -- sometimes the first paragraph makes me open the entry in a browser (like this one), but more often than not, it doesn't.
I'm reading you via Bloglines, which is the only RSS Reader I've ever really used, so not sure how good it is. I just value it being web-based because I use so many different computers day-to-day.
As for putting images/flash in -- I definitely see people including images, but not sure that I've ever seen Flash included! And Flash is generally wrong, but I think we've already had that conversation... ;-)
Righto, well the feed now has full entries and correctly formatted dates (!) - I think that's a step in the right direction. Next for comment feeds and categories, then I might be at the same stage everyone else was 3 years ago ;)
Finally! I can ditch my home-grown screen scraper thing now.
Hehe... sorry it took so long :)
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