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False Positives Adventures in Technology, SciFi and Culture from Toronto

Friday, October 24, 2003

Optimizing your RSS feed , minimizing your readers pain.

Nick ansers in relation to his Feed News Reader, but it is good advice for any and all feeds you acutal what someone to use/read. (He just gets more questions than me!)

Nick Bradbury: "Optimizing your RSS feed for FeedDemon

  1. Include each item's publication date, either with <pubDate> or with <dc:date>.A large number of feeds don't include the publication date of each news item, which means that News Readers can only show when an item was received (downloaded).
  2. Use a short, descriptive <title> for each news item. If you don't have useful titles, readers may not know whether they want to read what you have to say.
  3. Don't skip the <description>. Some feeds contain only titles, forcing people to visit their sites if they want to read an item. This also hampers
    offline reading, which is a major annoyance for some people.
  4. Avoid excessive HTML formatting in your descriptions. If you want people to see your design skills, point them to your site rather than unnecessarily bloating your RSS feed.


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