Did you know that, should you feel the need, you can subscribe to a list of wanted criminals’ names? The West Midlands Police - Wanted RSS feed lists the names of men...or women...wanted in connection with specific enquiries.
You can also see the list on the force’s new Facebook page, where you can also download posters to ward off would-be trick-or-treaters.
Feed readers take RSS feeds and display them in a meaningful way, but if you provide only summaries of your posts you make your readers’ lives harder and reduce the likelihood of your content being read.
RSS is a technology that is most effective for blogs, giving us an easy way to read authors’ content. Before the advent of Web-based apps like Google Reader, providing summaries of blog posts via the description tag made sense: there were fewer feeds around (worth reading) in those days so you received alerts when new content was made available, much like we still do now with email.
But as the number of blogs increases, and with the advent of blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and all the rest of them, “really simple syndication” (which isn’t what RSS stands for*) is widely regarded as the way to read blog posts.
I very rarely visit blogs any more, unless a particular post uses script that Google Reader can’t render or that RSS doesn’t reproduce. However, there is another reason that forces me to jump out of my reading panel and disrupt my flow, and that is incomplete feeds.
As I mentioned before, you used to be able to get away with putting a summary of your content in the description tag of each post’s item tag. (Most developers use the word “node” as it’s an XML term, but it’s a similar makeup to HTML so I’m simplifying). However, bloggers - or more specifically blogging platform developers - can embed the entire content of a post into the item tag by creating a content:encoded tag and importing a namespace (basically adding a line near the top of the RSS document). Feed readers understand this tag, which allows for storing of HTML, which obviously includes images and embedded Flash movies.
This relatively small change has a massive effect on the way a reader consumes an author’s content and it is very simple to implement, however there are still a number of blogs that don’t use this and I find it infuriating.
When I’m skimming through the new articles that have been written in the last 24 hours or so, if I see a headline that catches my eye - or a new article by a writer whose posts I particularly enjoy - I want to read the whole article there and then, in a familiar setting. I don’t want to have to click, scroll, adjust to the layout and continue reading.
Imagine if you were reading a newspaper, but instead of printing the full article the publishers just printed the page number of an accompanying magazine which was full of adverts. If they did that for every section you’d be up to your knees in cheap gloss.
Bloggers: please take a look at the source code for your RSS feeds. (You can do it in your Web browser.) If you don’t see a content:encoded tag for each of your posts, download the right plugin for your blog software or contact your developer because your posts could be going unread. (Failing that you could simply be annoying your readers, and there’s never a reason for that.)
There are people who, infuriatingly enough serve incomplete RSS feeds on purpose, because they want to track the number of subscribers they have. This is fairly pointless however because, if you are writing good content you will insight people either to comment on it, link to it, forward it on or visit the site to find out more, all of which are trackable. RSS readers are lurkers, so you should focus on converting them to real visitors by providing full content rather than arrogantly assuming they will follow your predetermined conversion path.
* it’s RDF Site Summary incidentally
I’m suffering from reader’s guilt. There are just too many posts from people I like, and not enough time to read them all.
It’s a problem I think many people have already come across and learnt to deal with. Their feed lists become fatter and fatter until eventually something gives and they end up hemorrhaging reading material.
Those whose blogs are well written and widely read often have a string of writers behind them, all gagging for their feed to be added to the author’s reader.
I have a similar problem. My blog isn’t massively read - I get the odd stumble which you assume helps you pick up one or two new subscribers - but I do have a lot of content I like to keep up with, and a fair amount of it is from friends and other contacts who are important to me, both personally and for my business.
As I’m a busy man with numerous projects and commitments on the go - as of course we all are - I only get time to glance through my Google Reader list and pick up on the ones that most attract my attention. The rest get marked automatically as read so that I don’t end up with a sea of folder names in bold blue with numbers of ever-increasing size in brackets.
Sometimes the only feeds I get the chance to read are ones to which I’m most closely linked: personal projects, possible networking opportunities and pearls of marketing wisdom. Even some of those types of posts fall by the wayside but in the main that’s all I seem to read now.
So my problem is not simply that I have too much to read, but more that I’m increasingly finding myself in a situation where people (in real life, you know, away from the monitor) talk about their latest posts and ask for my opinion, however I have no opinion to offer because I’ve simply not got round to reading their posts.
Again this is a problem I think many have dealt with: you learn to reconcile yourself to the fact that you can’t possibly read everything written by everyone you like, no matter how good they think it is. And it’s not because their work has a lower currency, it’s simply that when you’re reading for necessity and not simply for the pleasure of learning new things and being inspired, you have to make a difficult decision.
The simple fact is, I may never read that brilliant post you wrote last week, and that’s fine, because there’s so many other people who will that it makes no odds whether I do nor not. Thanks Pete for that piece of wisdom, which you imparted to me many weeks ago in a pub somewhere in Aston.