I just implemented a tool called feedburner that, IMHO, could really help change the user experience of RSS. It helps with three important things:
- Presents a user friendly web page when my rss feed is hit by a web browser, take a look: feeds.feedburner.com/experiencecurve
- Smart feeds: delivers the right RSS format depending on what tool is requesting the feed, and of course I don’t have to worry about maintaining a bunch of formats
- Provides me a unified view of who’s reading my RSS
The user experience of RSS is still somewhat at the fringe of the mainstream, it’s kind of like one of those exclusive clubs where if you don’t know about it you can’t come in. Basically, the vast majority of people don’t know what RSS is, or what do do with obscure little clicklets that have obtuse labels like “XML” or “RSS”. Additionally the web browsers don’t all know what to do with an RSS feed when it’s passed via http either, and just presents an XML file to the user. Well most of the population is going to think it’s an error and move on. Add to that all the formats, rss .92, 2.0, atom make it a pain in the ass when I’m trying to figure out what’s being read on my blog, my log file is full of RSS requests.
Feedburner has totally relieved the headache (for me and users) of multiple feeds in multiple formats. Basically feedburner takes my RSS and handles all the RSS requests on my blog, so instead of me pointing to a bunch of disparrant XML files I just point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/experiencecurve and it produces a nice browser friendly file that explains how to subscribe and what RSS is etc. It also gives me decent statistics about RSS activity that is hard to track when everyone is accessing RSS using different tools and different formats. Oh, and it’s free, with some options to subscribe for tracking and advertising tools.
Here’s a couple of interesting articles about why RSS adoption is low:
Why is RSS/Atom adoption so low?
Why is RSS adoption so low? Here’s why.
here’s the tool:
http://www.feedburner.com
feedburner wordpress plugin (redirects all feed requests to the
feedburner link):
http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/
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Nice publicity for Feedburner (and for you, on Feedburner’s website!). I implemented Feedburner on my personal site a few weeks ago. To keep my old feed links (several of them in different formats) from breaking, I added a little mod_rewrite action. Now everyone’s newsreader gets the new (single) feed in the format that best suits them.
yeah, the mod rewrite thing is working for me too. I was kind of worried because I had a tonne of rewrite stuff going on anyway and my .htaccess file is looking way too complicated at this point