Blog rss

The Daylife Enterprise API which launched today, is a service that lets you access your own content and give developers the chance to play with your offering, by giving you your own application programming interface.

Sites like Twitter and Flickr thrive because of their extensive interfaces, which allow developers to build applications that consume and interact with the content hosted thereon. My small contribution to The Big Picture and my own project Tweetpaste were/are both powered by those very APIs.

Rather than working with a well-established CMS like WordPress, Daylife’s developers produce a bespoke set of analysis tools that read your pages and help you serve your content back to you, so you can better decide how to display or manipulate it. You can also offer external developers (like me!) the opportunity to mashup your content and produce our own applications from it.

It takes a bit of reading around before you can fully understand the offering or its benefits, but the Guardian interview with Daylife’s CEO is probably a good place to start.

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.

I’m a sucker for change. I like to shake things up, and I get bored very easily, so I’m always interested by new browsers, search engines, social networking sites, gadgets and other assorted whatnots. Now Flock is hardly new: I tried it back in 2005 and enjoyed the experience, but it was pretty much useless if you weren’t using del.icio.us... which I wasn’t. However, something spurred me to try it again and see how far it’d come. But first, to give you a bit of background:

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, but with a much more attractive interface and a whole raft of social features. In fact it is this feature set that fuels its marketing as a “social web browser”.

Now let me get one thing straight. I’ve never liked Firefox, and I don’t like the assertion that it is God’s gift to web browsing. Certainly there’s a hell of a lot to be said for the Gecko engine on which it’s built, but the interface is dull and unfriendly and it’s less flexible than IE6. And why? Even IE6 supports liquid layouts without the use of tables, but which the Gecko engine never did. (I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of that, but it is true).

I wholeheartedly invite someone to supply a link to a site that successfully uses liquid layouts in CSS: I would genuinely like to be proven wrong because it’ll save me a whole bunch of time in the future!

Also the argument that people constantly trot out about it being open source is, for the 95% of people who use it (mostly web professionals because no-one else cares enough) frankly, bollocks. It matters not one jot whether you can download the source code if you’re not a programmer. Unless you’re a developer who wants to get his hands dirty, open source does not matter. There, I said it.

All of the above applies to Windows users only, by the way. For Linux and OSX it’s the best browser available, it’s just that for Windows, IE7 is better.

So, why Flock and not Firefox? Well for one the interface is much better. The dialog boxes are still too clinical and unfriendly for my liking, the scrolling isn’t as smooth and intelligent as in IE and editing in WordPress has some weird side effects. But all of these petty little issues were overridden by the rich feature set. For example:

The People Sidebar shows you an at-a-glance view of your social network identities. You can update your Twitter status, read through your Facebook minifeed, browse your Flickr library and go straight to YouTube...and more besides.

The Media Bar gives you a river of images and videos from sites to which you subscribe, using something they call media feeds, a bit of black magic I still haven’t managed to figure out (it’s not based on RSS, so I’m not entirely sure what is, in fact, the deuce.)

The Feeds Sidebar shows you a folder-based list of all your RSS feeds, marking out those which have unread items. You can read through them, marking off the ones that you’ve read (it’s supposed to happen automatically but rarely works) or easily sharing them via your blog.

If you’re a Google or Yahoo! Mail user you can check your inbox and compose a new message with a mere two clicks. You can share your favourite links via del.ici.ous, keep clippings of web pages and write new blog posts directly from your browser window. The search facility is great too (it defaults to Yahoo! but we all make mistakes).

And it is precisely because of all of these features that I’m getting rid of it. My small but ever-growing RSS list coupled with my subscription to a constantly changing Flickr photo stream means I’m forever seeing little red icons that demand my immediate attention.

This is not Flock’s fault. Of course this behaviour is by design and it’s great, not to mention being what I thought I wanted, but now I realise that these features simply distract me from work. I thought I wanted to be updated when someone published something new, but at the moment it feels like I’m being notified every time someone farts and it’s all too much!

There are a few other issues aswell, like not being able to sync all my accounts, settings and feeds with my laptop or even my Pocket PC, but the real reason is that all these fantastic connectivity tools are just far too tempting. You can’t have a Media Bar and not fill it: that would be a hideous waste of the developers’ precious time!

Plus you could say “why don’t you just ignore the red icons until you’re ready?” but you’re crediting me with self-control that I just don’t have. I want to know what’s going on right now, but my conscience tells me there’s work to be done.

So it’s been a fun few weeks playing with Flock and spending the time getting it just the way I like it - including installing the English rather than American dictionary for the excellent spell checker - and if you can control the urge to press the big red buttons that say “do not press” then check it out for yourself: it is of course free!

And if you feel like berating me for my earlier rant on open source web browsers please feel free to leave a comment: I’m all about debate!

Right then. Start, Control Panel, Uninstall a Program...