I know I said I was sick of RSS for a while, but this is the last word for a while. I swear. I just thought I should clarify what I learned over the past day or two.
Many sites, and particularly blogs, have feeds associated with them, but lots of people don't know what a feed is or how to use it. If you have a feed it is a good idea to encourage people to subscribe to your feed so that you don't fall off the radar - your feed will deliver your fresh content to them through their feed reader.
But in order to encourage people to subscribe to your feed you need to ensure they know what a feed is and how to use it.
A lot of sites still just have an orange XML button which leads to the raw feed, which to the average visitor will just look like a broken page full of codey garbage.
So, after looking around and doing a small bit of thinking I have put together a four step plan for presenting your feeds to your visitors.
I'm focussing on blogs here because I think if you're reading this it's probably what's most relevant to you, and I'm assuming you are actually publishing a feed already.
- Use a 'SUBSCRIBE' button.
- Include a help button with help page.
- Include a link to your feed in the head of your html.
- Style your feed.
1. Use a 'SUBSCRIBE' button.
Use a button that says 'SUBSCRIBE' (rather than XML, FEED or something else) and have that button link directly to your feed.
Dave Winer advocated this and I thought it made a lot of sense. It's a very simple word which people understand. Much more so than XML or FEED. Everybody knows, in general, what it means to subscribe to something. However, they may not know what you mean by subscribe on your site. That's where point 2 comes in:
2. Include a help button with help page.
Next to your SUBSCRIBE button, you should include a help button which links to a page with information about feeds and subscribing. I have written a page which you are free to copy if you wish. My subscribe help page includes some basic information about feeds and feed readers and also includes links to futher reading and of course the links to the feed for my site.
If you would like to use my buttons for points 1 & 2 you are free to do so:
Alan O'Rourke of Spoiltchild has his own implementation of this approach and he too allows people to use his buttons if you prefer them, visit his blog and grab them.
3. Include a link to your feed in the head of your html.
This is fairly easy to do and is done automatically by a lot of blogging software, just check to make sure it's there because it facilitates auto-discovery of your feed. In other words, users can give their feed reader your site url and the feed reader will be able to find your feed automatically.
To check that you have this covered, view the source of the home page of your blog and look for something similar to the following:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="myfeed.rss" title="RSS feed for My Page">or
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Feed" href="http://www.mysite.com/atom.xml" />This bit of code should be between the
<head> and </head> tags. If it's NOT there you need to add it to your blog template. You'll need to do a bit of research to check what kind of feed your blogging software is using and where it is publishing it to. If you're using blogger then you are using the second example above: atom.xml. Blogger should be including this link in the head though, so if it's not there the simplest thing to do is check your template for missing blogger tags in the head.4. Style your feed.
This one is the most complex issue and I'm not going to go into it too much detail but I think it is a vital issue so I will provide some links to relevant material.
As I said, a lot of sites provide a link to their feed which is NOT styled and so to the average user it just looks like gobbledygook. What you really want is a solution somthing similar to Microsoft's or the BBC's which clearly tells the visitor where they are and what the page is meant for.
I particularly like the BBC feed because it is extremely clear, explains to the user that they are looking at a feed and provides links for more information.
If you use Blogger, like myself, then this is taken care of, albeit not all that well at the time of writing. It's not clear enough and the link provided is to a page which isn't very clear to the average visitor either.
If you are somewhat technical and have control over your feed, then these articles will be of interest to you:
Making Your RSS Feed Look Pretty in a Browser
Making RSS more presentable with XSLT
Conclusion
Points 1 & 2 are very easy to implement, save the images for the buttons and upload them to your own site, then add the code below to your page but change all the urls to make sure they are correct for your site:
<a href="http://mysite.com/atom.xml"><img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/subscribe.gif" alt="Subscribe to the feed for this page." title="Subscribe to the feed for this page." height="14" width="80" /></a> <a href="http://www.mysite.com/subscribe-info.htm"><img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/help3.gif" alt="What's all this about subscribing?" title="What's all this about subscribing?" height="14" width="14" /></a>For the help page, you can download this zipped, plain version of my subscribe help page then unzip it and open it in your html editor to edit to your liking.
Or you could just link to this plain version but then your feeds won't be on the page.
Points 3 and 4 are slightly more complex, but the chances are that your blogging software has taken care of these for you. I include them simply because I think it is all four points together make the most usable solution for the time being.
I hope this has been useful to somebody - if you have suggestions or feedback do please leave a comment.
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6 Comments:
this is a great idea frank!
thanks for taking the time to document it all and i hope you don't mind me using your help page on my own blog.
it's crucial to spread the word about rss because it has such tremendous benefits, but i can see why a lot of people are bamboozled by all the jargon and run a mile. initiatives like this should help greatly...
Thanks Janine, glad you like it. Use the page, no problem. If you feel like giving a link back that'd be great (but not a requirement!)
Cheers,
Frank
Thanks Frank!
With the permission that you gave in the sidebar, I snagged the help page as well. Put a "thank you" and link back to you...
Nice work Sir!
-Andrew Milo
www.miloco.com
blog.miloco.com
Thanks Andrew, it's great when people actually get some use out of the hours I spend blogging about stuff! :P
Frank,
This is somewhat self serving for me and I apologize, but I do feel that your readers will like what they see...and it's free.
Feedpass.com essentially does what you are recommending here for RSS publishers, but does it in seconds. Creating a help page is a burden for many bloggers. Heck, many aren't even sure how to make a simple subscribe button, let alone a full help page that has to be maintained.
Feedpass.com does this and more. It creates an integrated help page and subscription mechanism for any feed. It provides readers with tutorials on RSS, social bookmarking/tagging, etc. along with content previews. Then it provides 56 different readers, 4 email tools, 15 tagging tools, and more to help users sign up for the feed.
It also monetizes the subscription process and allows both content owners and "linkers" to create feedpasses and earn money using their Google AdSense accounts. So, if I love your feed and you've claimed it with feedpass.com, I could create a link to your feed and earn Google AdSense credit on 1:3 page views and you'd get credit too. Even if you haven't claimed your feed, I could make a feedpass link to it and earn money.
Code and buttons are provided that can be easily copied and pasted into blog templates, etc. for subscribe buttons, browser auto-discovery, etc. Users can see page view stats for their feedpass pages to see how many people looked at the page, whether they subscribed or not. Since it doesn't touch the actual feed, you can still use tools like Feedburner for more in-depth statistical analysis.
Anyway, you're right on about this RSS usability issue. I've just taken it one step further by automating the process and simplifying it so that any publisher can do this immediately.
Thanks.
That's very interesting, thanks Feedpass... sorry it took so long to acknowledge your comment, but Blogeger broke my blog and I only received notification now!
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