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An Old RSS Pet Peeve

When website managers first discovered RSS, back in 2003 or so, feeds were often published like this:

An RSS Pet Peeve

That’s from the Canucks site. They list these two feeds on their RSS page, with no explanation of what each one contains. Which feed do I want? Is one the subset of another? Does the result of each game qualify as a ‘top story’ or plain old ‘news’?

I was guilty of something similar in 2003, when I still worked for the Man. I don’t think we were very thoughtful about how we split up our news (we had a press release feed and a corporate news feed or some bollocks).

But we’ve had five years to learn, and it’s not brain surgery. Provide one feed with everything in it, and then slice out a few feeds in ways that people might actually want to use them: game highlights, off-ice team news, corporate updates, and so forth.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:38 am and is filed under Canucks, Web 2.0. Tag Testing Project: , , , , . Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.

One Response to “An Old RSS Pet Peeve”

  1. Roland Tanglao Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    afaik drupal and other modern web site building tools like wordpress allows you to generate one rss feed per tag and slice and combine them

    don’t use a tool which doesn’t let you do that! it’s 2008!

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