Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Feedless bloggers frustrate

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Chad — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:15:24 -0000

You may be interested in the Feed Icon Library that I created. I searched long and hard for many different feed icons.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Evil — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 17:18:28 -0000

About sites that don't have RSS there is an option by using www.feed43.com to turn any website into and RSS feed.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Abby — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:11:30 -0000

Luv my browser (IE7 Beta2) auto-discovering the feeds available on the page.

No lap-lapping the whole page to search for one. I'm a lazy moron.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Deepak — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:49:58 -0000

And that's somewhat counterintuitive, since feeds are probably more useful in some ways and extend beyond blogs.

I would like to see one development. Feeds that can be filtered. Some sites allow users to set up queries which can then be converted into feeds. I find these most useful. Perhaps RSS 3.0 can include this in the standard?

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Abhijit Nadgouda — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:03:39 -0000

I think the problem is that feeds are still not as popular as blogs. And feedreaders are not as popular as browsers. Feeds are still in the tech zone probably, while blogs are household names.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Tim Weber — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:37:01 -0000

Ole - autodiscovery on the BBC website does work ... my Firefox definitely shows the RSS icon in the address bar when I look at the BBC News website ...

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Chris Jara — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:35:45 -0000

I like sticking with orange symbol also. And I would also suggest, as you alluded to your wife, that one should setup the autodiscovery tag in their sites.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Chris Haaker — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:26:55 -0000

Symantec has a security "blog" but it didn't have a feed forcing you to visit the page each time you wanted to read it (by design I imagine as well). Never subscribed and I gave them some pointed feedback as well. I will consume your content in the way that best suites me - not you! Now they have a feed link but it is still not intuitive. It just links to other RSS feeds that are "site wide."

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Step — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:26:20 -0000

Brian, thanks for the link to copyblogger. It's just what I was looking for. Robert, thanks for the motivation. I got my RSS cleaned up and presented nicely, with a bow on top, after stumbling across your article. :)

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Robin Capper — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:05:24 -0000

I settled on:
- the icon
- "Subscribe to my feed"
- "Learn about Subscription, Feeds, RSS, Podcasts" link

I removed all the service specific icons as thought they just create clutter but not sure if that's the right move?

If you click on my feed icon/link FeedBurner serves up a web view + explanation of RSS and all those service specific icons. That's nice as I remember doing that & getting xml, till I read about RSS wondered what it was all about.
I'm doing a presentation on Blogs/RSS in a couple of weeks so the comments here are of interest.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

mo — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 04:36:53 -0000

i downloaded desktop sidebar and your rss feed was already in the newsroom and I added a few of my own feeds and it's great

have you ever thought about changing your times new roman font, i hate it - good thing you have an rss feed

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Ron — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:19:20 -0000

Robert, how many feeds do you get per day? And what is it percentage-wise of your overall views? Just curious.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Mike Puchol — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:02:49 -0000

Here is a quick story that has been happening to me since I started my blog, and only figured it out a few days ago.

Problem was that indexing sites such as Technorati were not taking any notice of my blog's pings to them (the blog is a standard WordPress, nothing fancy). Hard as I looked and tried things, I just could not get it to work. I even got thinking it may have been the .am domain block being in some known spammers list.

It turns out that the theme I picked for the blog had *no* RSS feed at all. It was simply not implemented, not even in hidden tags on the HTML header. I edited my sidebar to show the icon and feed link, I also added hidden links to the feed in the header, and voila! - instant index in Technorati.

Lesson learned: check your feeds, and check your templates!

Sorry if I pissed you off during the time I had no feed up :)

Regards,

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Robert Scoble — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:59:59 -0000

Brian, that's cool, thanks!

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Robert Scoble — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:59:23 -0000

Rishi, don't get me started about partial feeds. I hate them too!

Suppo: subscribed! Better be good! :-)

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Brian — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:57:47 -0000

Robert I hope posting this is OK with you, but many months ago I wrote an introduction to RSS that anyone can use on their site as a "what is rss" page:

http://www.copyblogger.com/...

If anyone out there wants it for their site, there's a link to the HTML in a txt file at the bottom.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Rishi R — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:59:18 -0000

I am annoyed by websites that have RSS feeds but do not put the complete post in the feed. So the feed just has a part of the post and to get the whole post you have to go to the website anyway. Even BBC does not have the complete post in RSS.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

suppositious — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:54:46 -0000

Okay! Add feed! Add icon!

(Whatever he says, I guess. Now, where's that feed? ... ouch! who left their skateboard in the middle of the f... How about here? No... here? This cupboard? No. The cabinet over the TV? Naw. Ah! I'll have to make my
own, because I use a WordPress linear (on-line) (free) blog, and the feed is, oh...... I see, that's easy....)

Now, I've subscribed to your feed, so you (I guess) should subscribe to mine. (Here:

http://suppositious.wordpre...

Which reminds me: You know why they call 'em "seniors"? Because by the time you're that old, the answer to "Show me yours and I'll show you mine?" is: "I've seen yours."

I'm still looking for a better looking icon for the feed. Whatever you want, Robert. Anything. My favorite reader.

'sup!
suppositio.us
feed: http://suppositious.wordpre...

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Deepak — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:31:51 -0000

Another way to detect feeds is the Google Toolbar. I use it to add feeds to bloglines (I recently switched from Sage when I found I was using different computers).

... and yes, whenever I need to introduce anyone to RSS, I send them to the BBC site. They do such a wonderful job.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

ScW — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:27:41 -0000

That's the problem though with the buttons on the screen. There is no standard behavior for what to do when someone clicks on it. Just show them the XML feed? Or take them somewhere else? Or have a "feed://" type of link that is technically not a real standard?

I just look for Firefox to indicate whether it senses a feed. Regardless, I just hit a Subscribe with Bloglines link on my browser and it finds one if it's there.

Brian above suggests a "subscribe" button... but what should that button do? And this is the one problem with RSS... nobody "gets it" until they've used it. So ultimately, I am not convinced it really needs to be on my page if every feed reading tool out there is going to detect my feed anyway. If the feed tool needs an exact URL to the feed, you better find a better tool.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Gareth Simpson — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:20:41 -0000

BBC News - http://news.bbc.co.uk/ - has gone to the standard feed icon and the help text now says 'Feed' instead of 'RSS'.

Since they've adopted it, the BBC's handling of RSS has been examplary (go click on a feed if you haven't already). I know the company I work for were inspired *ahem* by their stylesheet when they added RSS support.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Christopher Coulter — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:15:34 -0000

Hahah, making the prosecutions case for itself, eh? Talk about a test case example of why RSS will never mainstream...

And Digg and other link-farms have already taken up that purpose. How so 1996, eh? Ten years later and the web is just more 'Webcrawler' link farms. The geeks fiddling and warring away with their fancy syndicational formats, but only them...

Compare Digg users to RSS users...game over already. But I do so want a Pointcast 2006 style, please, pretty please.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Code Red — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:12:30 -0000

Your post must have done its job...Anita Rowland's site now cleary has an RSS icon in the lefthand menu.

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

MiniMage — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:02:39 -0000

I really LIKE my feed icon, though...It's got the orange color and "XML" in it; isn't that enough?

Re: Feedless bloggers frustrate

Chris L — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:55:37 -0000

Feedburner saves the day... It cleaned up that feed and it's Safari friendly.
http://feeds.feedburner.com...