Doing Feeds correctly
Is there any service online which doesn’t support RSS or Atom? Probably not any which is interesting. Unfortunately, however, a lot of services who offer them are not doing it correctly, or at least in a manner that is usable/undertsandable by users. Want to see example?
Here is my Flickr feed : The title is “Uploads by Julien Genestoux”, which seems to make sense. However let’s imagine someone has hundreds of feeds : there is not way this person will know that we’re talking of the uploads to my flickr account. A better title would be “Flickr pictures from Julien Genestoux”.
Another example? This is my Identica Profile. If you’ve got a web browser that supports “feed recognition”, you should have an icon in you URL bar : click on it. If you’re like me, you’ll be asked for a password. What? Most of the feed readers have feed auto-extraction. None of them would be able to pull the RSS feeds, which makes these feeds pretty useless
Another example? There are tons on the web! Here are a few recommandations to have your feed usable and useful :
- Have meaningful titles for your feeds themselves (better than Flickr)
- Make sure that the information contained makes sense : <link> elements should link to the same “resource” as the feed. Some services put the root url, while we’re looking at a users’s profile
- Make sure anyone can access/read them. (Validate them if you can).
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And you, what would you advise to people who provide Feeds?
