My Changing Attitude Towards RSS
I wasn't planning another post on RSS, but the feedback on Wednesday has prompted me to think about the whole thing some more. Thanks to all those who commented by the way. I might not always reply to them all but I do read each one carefully as they come in.
While some of what you said reinforced my ideas of how this site is used — previous form means you're willing to visit without anything other than a title to help you work out if it will be worthwhile — there were those who confirmed my fears. My worry is that without a decent title and/or description some of you just won't bother visiting.
My views on RSS have mellowed over the years. Some of you remembered the last time I discussed it and my pig-headed stance of "Hey, the content's here. Come and get it. It's your loss if you don't!". That's no longer how I see it.
The goal of this site is and always has been to share knowledge. Ok, so there's also a feint whiff of "look how clever I am" showee-offness to it, but it's mainly just about sharing. To share effectively I need to get the content to as many people as possible. To do that I need to cater for all the different ways in which people consume the content. Once upon a time in this site's not too distant history that meant bookmarks and a regular visit. Times changes though and the majority of you now use RSS readers.
One reason I liked people to actually visit was to see how cool the site itself looked. This is no longer the case. It's an old design and not that cool really. I no longer care as much about people visiting "in person".
For the immediate future I plan on taking a little more care when thinking of titles for entries. I often spend upwards of an hour writing an entry and then the title is a mere afterthought that never gets the attention it deserves if it's to be the deciding factor in whether it even gets read.
The way I manage the blogs on here (mainly through the wbloggar app) means it's currently a hassle to give an entry an RSS description. I plan on making this easier for me to do so at least there's something other than the title to see. Then I plan on moving towards actual content in the feed itself.
How much content I add there (full or partial) and how I achieve it is what I've yet to decide. I'm inclined to go for full content but I'm not sure how Domino will handle it. Hopefully I'll be surprised at how well. And what about images? All relative links and references to images on this server will have to become absolute URLs if they're to appear inline with the feed. Unless RSS feeds support base hrefs? Lots to look in to!
Leave it with me anyway. You guys spoke on Wedneday and I was listening.
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You can subscribe to an individual
Base hrefs? Well I seriously doubt it. If you're ready the feed in NetVibes or Google Reader then resetting the base href can have a serious problem. I would avoid that alltogether. Just use an absolute reference. Not that hard to figure out.
I faced exactly the same problem recently - headers, headers+summary, or full content. I went for just headers on the basis the RSS, at the moment, is for 'attaching' to other sites.
For RSS readers, and when it becomes more available I was favouring summaries, but I still go backwards and forwards.
The main problem for me is there is a lot of content not using absolute URL's - so I may have to start things from a specific point.
Hi Jake. I've been making full and partial posts available for a while. To keep the bandwidth down and reduce the hit on the server, the full posts feed only presents the last few entries and the partial posts presents a few more over that. Seems to be a good strategy so far.
I also got in the habit of using absolute URLs a long time ago.
We publish the full content in the RSS feed of our blog. It is based on BlogSphere 3.0.1 beta 7 - and it's running on Domino 8.
Thomas
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I must be a complete luddite. I now, after a few years, consider rss to be a complete pain in the kneck, about on a par with online gaming as a total waste of time/life.
I'm tired with being bombarded with information I may or may not want, rss feeder churning away, mobile bleeping, information overload etc, - I need some time to myself to get some work done, read a good book or look for something on the net that I'm actually interested in instead of some feed telling me I should be interested in it.
Sadly after all these years online, I have found that there are no more than about 30 "old friends" I consider worth visiting regularly, about 4 of those are domino related and Codestore is among them because it has excellent content that I actually want to read. I add about 1 or 2 sites a year out of the thousands I visit, and 1 or 2 drop off a year.
The rest of it I can take or leave. If I need to find something I've got search engines.
I no longer want to be interrupted to be told I might be interested in something I'm usually not interested in. - Life's too short.
My rss reader is off, as is my mobile most of the time. I'm enjoying my life more now, and getting more work done.
Jake,
To be perfectly honest, I do not follow links from RSS feeds if there is no content there. All that really needs to be there, for me, is the who, what, where, when and why so i can decide to visit the full post or not.
There are others who will not even visit with just this, they want the whole post in the feed. To me that is overkill.
To each their own.