WordPress.com’ RSS feeds suck

October 31, 2005 By

Update: since writing this post WordPress’s feeds started validating. That needs to be pointed out because I’ve found the WordPress team is remarkably fast at listening to its users and implementing fixes and features. Yesterday at the Blog Business Summit it was praised on stage multiple times for just this reason. Can you please let me know if my feed works great in your RSS aggregator? That will help us make sure this really rocks. Thanks!

Turns out there are lots of people complaining about my RSS feed. Turns out if you click on my XML icon you get a “funky” feed. Sorry Matt, but I’m getting too many complaints from my readers to say it’s not. I never got complaints about my old feed. WordPress.com REALLY needs to nail this.

My old feed validated. It did not look funky when you looked at it. Why don’t my description fields have full text? My old ones did and no one complained. My old feed didn’t get complaints. My new feed is getting complaints.

The CData stuff in my description is confusing, by the way. For me. My old feed didn’t use them. I’m not sure why the new feed needs to use that. It makes my feed look ugly and I’m not sure it makes my feed any better.

Now, Matt Mullenweg says that I can get different feeds by adding RSS, Atom, or RDF onto the end of my URL. OK, let’s try that. Here’s my RSS feed. It sucks. Here’s why. It is not full text. Look at the description field. Sorry, RSS feeds that don’t have full text suck.

I just tried my Atom feed and I couldn’t even get it to load up in the browser. That certainly is not good usability (RSS pulls up, but not Atom). So, I fired up Firefox. It still required me to do some work to get it to open up in the browser. That’s funky. It should open up in the browser right away without trying to spit it down to a file.

But, let’s forget that funkiness for a second. Then I see where he’s going wrong. The Atom feed is better than his RSS feed. He has a summary AND a full text version in Atom. That’s acceptable in Atom, but it’s non standard in RSS.

And, so, my RSS usability is broken. I’m almost forced to put two links on my blog, one for RSS and one for Atom. And the RSS is broken for my readers.

Matt, please fix this. It’s a HUGE issue for me. I can’t stay on a service that has partial text feeds or RSS that doesn’t validate. Sorry. That’s just not something I can compromise on and I can’t go with a service that biases Atom ahead of RSS support since so there are news aggregators out there know how to deal with RSS and are barfing on my feeds (I’m getting an email or two complaining about this every day).

However, this is why you can’t write a review of a blogging tool without really using that tool. It’s why I’m happy my wife is using MSN Spaces and my son is using Google’s Blogger and my book blog is on TypePad and my internal blog is on Community Server. I would have totally missed the funkiness of WordPress’s RSS feeds if I hadn’t had tons of readers follow me around and complain.

Here’s the solution: copy my old Radio UserLand feed. It worked. This new feed stuff does not.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Russia

How to get on Memeorandum

October 30, 2005 By

People keep asking me about how to get noticed. How to get on Digg. How to get on Memeorandum. Well, you’re asking “how do you promote your blog?”

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman and I talked about that (his company has been in lots of newspapers because of his blogging) on stage at the Blog Business Summit.

The Eastside Business Blog took some good notes that might help you.

I get a ton of email every day asking me to blog their site. I love getting that kind of email. Just make it simple. One paragraph with a URL (only make it longer if you really are adding any value). Say “this might be interesting to you.” Don’t beg for a link. I hate that. I do love knowing about new stuff that I don’t yet know about. I don’t blog everything I’m sent, sorry. I get more than 100 emails a day.

Which is why I said not to rely on a link from me to get noticed. But I still enjoy learning new things.

Oh, and where does the male bias come from in Memeorandum? Well, I just did a quick look through my “blog this” folder in email. Almost all the email I get suggesting I look at new blogs is from men. I think there’s a social phenomenon going on here that researchers should look into.

Filed Under: Blog Tips

RSS usability sucks

October 30, 2005 By

At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.

Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”

Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.

And then there’s sites like Dare Obasanjo’s. He’s a geek. Works at MSN. But look at the right side of his blog. He has four DIFFERENT icons for RSS. One for Yahoo. One for MSN. One for Bloglines. One for Newsgator.

Oh, I bet Jakob Nielsen is screaming right about now.

Whenever I hit problems like this I ask myself “what would Jeffrey Zeldman do?” Or WWJZD for short. :-)

Why Jeffrey? He’s still leading the Web design movement forward and is my favorite writer and speaker on the topic.

I find his minimalistic answer unsatisfying. He puts a text link in very small type at the bottom of his page.

My advice? Stick with the orange XML icon. Why? It sticks out. If the page Molly was trying to deal with yesterday had one of those she would have found it instantly. The BBC’s answer is actually pretty good too. They went with an Orange RSS button and next to it have a link to “What is RSS.”

In fact, I think that’s really the best answer: “just do what the BBC does.”

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Dev Tools, Russia, Web

One guy at Microsoft I wished blogged more

October 30, 2005 By

You probably don’t know Charles Fitzgerald. He’s one of those guys who you might read about in the press once in a while but most people wouldn’t see. But I’m on his team and I’ve gotten to see some of the things he’s done at Microsoft and I’m most impressed. I met him in the hall the other day and we chatted about the tech industry and he’s one of those guys who is scary smart and that you can’t BS. He’s one of those guys who gets mentioned at meetings with 1,200 people. Why? Cause he makes stuff happen and cause he doesn’t hold back his opinions and he’s scary smart.

I’m so blessed to be surrounded by people like that. Why? Cause it sharpens your mind. You’ve gotta do your best work to impress people like that (and sometimes even that isn’t enough).

He doesn’t write on his blog very often, but it is enjoyable when he does and I always learn something.

Filed Under: Event, Microsoft Office

New Memorandum stance, BlogTronix impresses

October 30, 2005 By

I’m going to make a real effort not to link to anything that’s already on Memeorandum. Why? Because that way new things will show up on Memeorandum. Sorry, Shelley Powers, that means I won’t link to you today either. ;-) (Which is a bummer, cause she made some good points about Memeorandum’s bias).

But, yesterday at the Blog Business Summit I saw two things that really are interesting. Here’s why. When I go to companies to speak, they keep asking me “how do I do something similar to Channel 9.” That isn’t easy. We had two developers working on that for quite a while. They started with Community Server from Telligent (Microsoft’s employee blogs are run on top of Community Server — we have more than 2,000 now and a TON of traffic, so it holds up very well. The new Xbox.com forums are built on top of Community Server as well). Our tech team on Channel 9 (Charles, Brin, Adam, and Jeff) mashed in video components and a Wiki and other stuff and then hacked the heck out of it to make it Channel 9. I’ve been hoping that a company would come out with a set of tools/service that would make it possible to do a Channel 9 style site.

BlogTronix is the answer. It’s awesome. Has all that and more (and has security built in so you can blog both internally and externally very easily). I’m going to get a test blog there and will write more after I actually can try it out.

The other thing that Steve Broback showed on stage was FeedFire. It lets you build RSS feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. Steve writes about that tool here.

Update: I totally messed this post up, so here’s the fixed post.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Chat, entrepreneurs, Web

Dare says I just rediscovered Hailstorm

October 29, 2005 By

Dare Obasanjo, who works on the backend team at MSN, says I just rediscovered Hailstorm (which was Microsoft’s doomed effort to host your data on its servers). Hmmm, I didn’t remember Hailstorm being aimed at end users. I also didn’t remember that Microsoft tried to take people slowly into that world. They wanted them to jump in feet first. They also didn’t have the trust of customers the way Google has the trust of people on the street.

The other thing that’s hurting Microsoft? We don’t have a monetization gadget. Do we pay bloggers yet to include components? Not yet. Google does. That gets bloggers and Silicon Valley businesspeople to feel good about including their components on Web pages (and bootstraps them into this new world in a way that keeps people from screaming). Oh, and they didn’t name it “Hailstorm.”

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Microsoft Office, music, Web
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »