Comments on: Why They’re Doing This http://jens.mooseyard.com/2008/04/why-theyre-doing-this/ Little boxes made of words, by Jens Alfke Sun, 02 May 2010 05:43:47 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Josh Bryant http://jens.mooseyard.com/2008/04/why-theyre-doing-this/comment-page-1/#comment-2589 Josh Bryant Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:09:20 +0000 http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/04/why-theyre-doing-this/#comment-2589 Offering multiple feeds with different content I'm fairly sure no one thinks is a bad idea. The pop up in Safari is pretty genius and I love the way that it works. For instance, my blog is a combination of blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, etc... You can see a quick screencap of how I implemented this <a href="http://www.grabup.com/uploads/d53a25a01f9c221c3165447922e0cd6c.png" title="screenshot" rel="nofollow">here</a>. I'm in the camp though that offering multiple feeds of the same content that simply just serve a different version of XML is kinda stupid. Is there a single aggregator out there that can handle RSS 2.0 but not 1.0? I also find it pretty funny that RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and we've gone out of our way to make it as non-simple as we can by throwing multiple types & versions in there. If my mom was presented with that menu in Allen's screencap she'd have no idea which one to click. Offering multiple feeds with different content I’m fairly sure no one thinks is a bad idea. The pop up in Safari is pretty genius and I love the way that it works.

For instance, my blog is a combination of blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, etc… You can see a quick screencap of how I implemented this here.

I’m in the camp though that offering multiple feeds of the same content that simply just serve a different version of XML is kinda stupid. Is there a single aggregator out there that can handle RSS 2.0 but not 1.0? I also find it pretty funny that RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and we’ve gone out of our way to make it as non-simple as we can by throwing multiple types &#38; versions in there. If my mom was presented with that menu in Allen’s screencap she’d have no idea which one to click.

]]> By: garoo http://jens.mooseyard.com/2008/04/why-theyre-doing-this/comment-page-1/#comment-2588 garoo Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:15:46 +0000 http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/04/why-theyre-doing-this/#comment-2588 I didn't read every article that commented on the Textism post, but it never occurred to me that anybody would actually be complaining about the fact that Safari offers a choice? And now with your comment I went to reread the original post, and I'm not even sure which was originally his point. Because I immediately assumed that he meant it was insane for bloggers (and blog platforms) to offer different formats and ask the user (or their browser) to choose. I agree that it used to make sense, back in the time when only the savviest users had RSS aggregators anyway, but I reckon that all the aggregators that matter now know how to handle everything you throw at them. But there's no question to me that the drop-down menu needs to stay, because there _are_ many valid reasons (starting with those you cite, but there are others because RSS is not limited to blogs) why a site may want to offer several feeds. (Although in those cases webmasters would be better off having a prominent RSS webpage that explains the choices.) I didn’t read every article that commented on the Textism post, but it never occurred to me that anybody would actually be complaining about the fact that Safari offers a choice? And now with your comment I went to reread the original post, and I’m not even sure which was originally his point. Because I immediately assumed that he meant it was insane for bloggers (and blog platforms) to offer different formats and ask the user (or their browser) to choose. I agree that it used to make sense, back in the time when only the savviest users had RSS aggregators anyway, but I reckon that all the aggregators that matter now know how to handle everything you throw at them.
But there’s no question to me that the drop-down menu needs to stay, because there _are_ many valid reasons (starting with those you cite, but there are others because RSS is not limited to blogs) why a site may want to offer several feeds. (Although in those cases webmasters would be better off having a prominent RSS webpage that explains the choices.)

]]>