...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Wednesday, September 08, 2004Amy Gahran's Contentious Webfeed Grab Bag
Amy's hits just keep on coming. Go read her posts. Lots of them. You'll learn something new. Guaranteed.
Special Grab Bag: Webfeeds, Webfeeds…. I was just looking over the contentious-to-do topic in my Furl archive, and noticed that several of the items there are about webfeeds in one way or another. So I decided to throw them together into a special grab bag. TOP OF THE LIST: RSS: Real advantage for marketing and PR, by Neville Hobson, Aug. 16. It seems I'm not the only person who's talking about how businesses are really missing the boat with regard to webfeeds. This article addresses how businesses could be leveraging both weblogs and webfeeds to their advantage right now. On webfeeds, Hobson writes, "The new reality is that blogs and RSS present a phenomenal opportunity to any organization to embrace these new communication channels and engage quickly, directly and effectively with customers, investors, partners and other audiences. If you can't start a blog yet, the one thing you should do is RSS-enable the corporate PR and marketing information on your website – and get your press releases out via webfeeds as well as by traditional means. (I've yet to find any large company who offers open RSS webfeeds of their press releases from their websites.)" Yeah. What he said. HERE'S THE REST OF THE LIST... [Contentious]
Radio UserLand RSS Generation - Temporary Insanity
Just after midnight this morning, the RSS feeds generated by Radio UserLand came unglued. Some items in the feed were duplicated. Others contained the correct "description" field data but had the "title" field data from the prior post. Entries in weblogdata.root file were fine. Items displayed correctly in the desktop website. Used the Radio application to re-publish both the home page and the category home pages, which generated new rss.xml files. Still screwed up. Off to bed.
Up this morning and re-published again. New rss.xml files generated. Still screwed up. Off to work.
Came home this evening and re-published again. New rss.xml files generated. Now they are correct.
This insanity is typical of Radio UserLand, and drives users totally apeshit. The poor newbies in the support forum pull their hair out, thinking they've done something wrong when Radio suddenly stops working correctly. It isn't their fault, it is Radio.
UserLand claims that addressing the many reliability and stability issues is top priority for the September update. Time will tell.
Moving RSS From Radio UserLand to Bloglines
Enough is enough.
I'm tired of all the problems with Radio's built-in news aggregator. I currently subscribe to over 160 RSS feeds. Most of them don't contain material that will be re-posted here. I've started moving the "non-post" feeds to Bloglines. The others I'll keep in Radio, for now.
An example problem? The aggregator chokes on simple things like FORM tags in Live Journal "survey and attitude" toys when they appear in feeds. Another example? UserLand only started beta testing Atom format support last month. Yes, I know the prior lack of Atom support was partially political and partially a resource issue. As a user, I don't care about the politics. UserLand is releasing a loooong overdue update later this month. The feeds I moved to Bloglines are staying there.
Enough is enough.
The Best RSS Advice I've Ever Heard
The Best RSS Advice I've Ever Heard.
...comes from Paul Boutin, in the form of this post:
How to lure more RSS readers
Robert Scoble: “Write better headlines and you’ll get more readers.”
So true. I’m guilty of not putting any effort into my own weblog headlines, but that’s because I don’t really care how many readers I get here, and I have professional headline writers working for me at Slate and Wired.
You, however, you who have 300 or 3000 daily weblog readers and wish you had ten times as many, should always think about what headline would make a reader click on an entry as opposed to passing it by. Usually it’s a matter of making clear what the entry is about, and what the relevant new info or commentary in the post is.
Of course, as you can see, the original source of the advice was Robert Scoble, but his original headline was:...so I never actually read that post.
I’m going to try to take this advice to heart.
[The RSS Weblog]