In the last few days I've been playing with RSS (and Atom) feeds alot. My customer needed an RSS system for the site I'm working on now and I realised (once more) that RSS feeds are bringing traffic to my site. It's easy to understand why my interest to this subject increased alot. I also got into a paradox: most bloggers I know have feeds (because their blog engine has that enabled by default), but verry few of them actually use RSS as a viable channel of comunication to their visitors. Well... They don't know what they're missing.
I won't try to preach about feeds, it's not the case, there are a lot of sites doing that. All I want is to increase awareness about what you can do with it.
From the web visitor's point of view, feeds will help you stay in touch with (most of) your blogger friends, without spending too much time. When browsing, you loose time by... browsing. Let me explain myself: if you have 5 blogs you are constantly visiting, you'll probably loose about 20 minutes just to see if the authors published something new - and probably find out 2 of them did not, 2 of them are crap and only one is actually interesting for you. You could do that in 2 minutes by using an RSS agregator. You have one in your Yahoo Mail or Google account. I personally use a Firefox add-on called Sage wich manages to save me some nice time (because I don't need to open a web page to check the feeds I'm interested in).
If you are a publisher (blogger???), and use a standard blog engine, you most probably got to a point where you were asking yourself: "Who reads my feed?". Well, the answer is many (educated) bloggers use a feed analyser. I use FeedBurner. You should give it a try to. FeedBurner reads your feed, and exports an improved version that will help you track users, by just logging in to your FB account.
If you happen to be a developer, and wanted to import articles from a RSS feed to your site, you probably found out you have a problem. You need to deal with a lot of standards and the programming languages (like PHP) will do their best to make your life miserable.
After spending half of Sunday trying to build a system that will allow me to read content from the (different types of) feeds my friends publish, I found SimplePie.
SimplePie is a PHP script (actually a collection of classes) that will do the reading for you. It even caches the feeds, so you will not generate useless trafic to your friend's site, and will not wait for 30 seconds to read the feed each time you refresh your page
I wanted at some points to add RSS feeds to my blor, to provide more useful content to the (few) visitors I have... Found it hard to decide on what I would like to add. I tried with news, but I guess it was a miserable periods, with all sort of calamities... I removed that, to keep my blog optimistic :)
Take care, and Happy National Day!
