Just saw this over on Lifehacker. Travelocity is now sending out travel deals through RSS.
The Worldbank blog does RSS the best
October 31, 2005 By
I like how the World Bank’s corporate blog did their RSS feed the best. That’s how I’m gonna make mine work. Easy to find, and if you find it by accident it explains what it is.
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.
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.”
