I have finished my 'AS Level' exams. Now all I can do is sit and wait for the results. While I have been away from this site for a while, I have managed to collect a list of links that might interest you.
Thats about it for the moment. More to come soon.
I signed up for my first feed in my agregator over a year ago. When I did this it was very easy for me to read what people had to say without having to visit each site individually. Most of the feeds I signed up to at first were RSS.
I liked the content collection method so much I made my own feed for my blog. When I first made my feed I was using a home grown content management system. Therefore, I had to make the feed myself aswell. I looked at a few feeds and decided upon RSS 2.0. This one, unlike many others, could be coded by hand. (Which I started off doing before it became too much of a chore to update my blog.) So I made my feed. I could see that the format for the posts in the feed would be:
<title></title>
<description></description>
<link></link>
This was great. I got my system to put the title in to the title tag. Obvious you may say. I put a short extract of the entry (some may say a description of the entry) in to the description tag. Then a link to where the page could be found in the link tag.
Taken from the RSS 2.0 Specification:
Title: The title of the item.
Link: The URL of the item.
Description: The item synopsis.
As you can see that is what was outlined in the specification. When looking for feeds on other people's sites I saw a lots of different types. Be it versions of RSS and Atom, to what the feed contained. When I saw that people had RSS feeds that contained their whole posts I was confused as that is not what the feed is for.
This behaviour can be explained as many people like to use their aggregator to download all the available posts when they have internet connection. Then when they have a spare minute they can read the full article without needing a conection. This behaviour however, doesn't seem to fit with the whole nature of a blog. As, if you are blogging you are usually blogging about something and provide links for people to follow.
When Atom hit the big time everything changed. In Atom you were first encouraged to provide a full entry, then a description if you wanted. (At least that is what I read when I made my Atom feed). This was great, people would no longer have to incorrectly use RSS feeds.
When Google Ad's took off people decided that it would be very nice to gain a little bit of revenue by people just clicking a link. This action then caused people, like me to search for full post feed so I didn't have to go to a page where I would be pesterd by advertising. Everyone was then happy. Site owners had a little money coming in from people clicking on their adverts; I was happy because I didn't have to go to other people's sites and see advertising.
The problem then came with the launch of FeedBurner. They offered a service by which they would mirror your feed for you so you didn't get lots of requests for it. They would also give you stats on how many people used your feeds, and how many people clicked through to your site through your feed. This was great for people who liked their stats.
FeedBurner also decided to give people an option of putting a little advertising at the botttom of each article in a feed. This caught on because people like me who previously avoided advertising would now be forced to read it.
This was ok and semi acceptable if the feed was a full post Atom feed. However to have advertising put in a feed that is only giving me two sentences as it is. Those feeds lead me to unsubscribe from them. If they posted anything important enough someone else would link to it.
Slashdot, in my experince have got the mix just right. They put one small advertisment in every third post on their site. For a site that produces the content that Slashdot does this will ensure I have at least one or two adverts when I check that feed. Which, when they produce full post articles is very acceptable.
So now when I find a site and I want to subscribe to it I will first run through a few criteria before even adding the link to my feedreader. First , does it produce a full content feed? If it does and contains no advertisement I will add it to my reader. If it contains adverts, check for a description only feed. If this contains adverts, the site isn't worth it, move on.
If you care that much about revenue through click throughs do what Michael Buffington did. Dont harass me at any opertunity.
In the last couple of days Russell Beattie decided it would be a good idea to put a comment form in his feed. When I fist saw this I knew I wasn't going to stay subscribed to that feed. There are several things wrong with this in my eyes.
Firstly, he provided no other feed. Incase I didn't want that form there. If I want to comment on one of his entries I will go to his site and use the form there.
Secondly, the form will get the wrong kind of responce. It draws away from the whole community that exists in comments. You can get people asking the same stupid question many times just because they asked it before looking if anyone else had.
Thirdly, as stated above this is the type of thing you should be using an Atom feed for - not an RSS one. The description tag is there not to be abused.
I think now you should be able to see how feeds are being abused. It is something that many people seem to have not yet picked up on. It is also now very obvious why some people have got confused.
Feed are built in xml. The tags could have been anything. Think why they picked the tags they did. I doubt it was a crazed dessison over a few pints in a club.