October 11, 2006

What are your RSS habits?

October 11, 2006, 10:02 PM | 4 Comments

I’ve read a couple of postings over the past few days on the state of personal websites these days (Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Blahg” and Greg Storey’s answer to that over at Airbag titled “Boxes”) and they (and some of their comments) have gotten me to thinking about how people use RSS feeds.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve wondered about this, but lately it seems like there’s more and more talk about how RSS feeds are being used, and what the “best” way to serve feeds to your readers is. With IE7 (and it’s built in RSS support) about to hit the main stream, RSS is also about to be exposed to most Windows users who haven’t previously heard about the technology.

First of all, for those of you who have never heard of RSS before and have no idea what it’s all about, basically it’s a way of getting the content of your favourite websites in a standardized XML format. One of its main benefits is that it makes seeing when your favourite sites have been updated extremely easy. If you embrace it, it will change the way you browse the web, and probably make your browsing far more productive. For more information, check out the RSS article over at Wikipedia.

I’ve personally always used RSS to keep on top of when my favourite websites or blogs had been updated, but I’ve never been one to read the content inside an RSS reader. Every time I see an article or posting that sparks my interest, I always follow the link from my RSS reader and read the article on its website, the way the content was most intended to be seen.

These days I use Flock as my default browser, solely because of its RSS functionality, but I got my first exposure to RSS because of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. That may be the reason that I’ve always visited a website when I wanted to read the whole article and I’ve stuck to that habit ever since switching to Flock, even though it’s perfectly capable of displaying the entire content of the entry.

The beauty of RSS is that it allows your content to be delivered easily to any number of ‘front ends’ including RSS readers, email clients with RSS support, browsers, portal sites, and more. The problem that this causes is that more and more people are just reading content in their RSS reader of choice and are going to the author’s website less and less.

FeedBurner tells me that a slight majority of people who subscribe to my RSS feed are using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, so those users probably click through to my site when I post a new article that is of interest to them. I know some people though that read sites exclusively through their RSS reader and very rarely (if ever) visit the author’s site anymore.

I don’t know if I really consider that to be a big issue, but I do know that for a lot of people (myself included) their preference would be that readers visit their site that they’ve spent countless hours working on to create great experiences for those readers. There’s just too much additional experience you miss out on (related articles, comments, etc.) if you’re always reading your feeds in a feed reader. If you really think about it, the look and feel of any of the sites you subscribe to probably played a large role in getting you to add the RSS feed to your feed reader in the first place. Obviously, quality content is key, but it’s the way that content is presented that usually draws people in and grabs their attention in the first place.

Now don’t get me wrong, I completely support RSS as a content delivery method, and if you are a reader that reads my articles in your RSS reader exclusively, you have no need to feel like I’m alienating you or trying to lay down a guilt trip on you, because that’s not my goal. If I had a real problem with things like that, I would publish excerpts of my posts in my RSS feed, not the full content.

So, I’d like to have a discussion: what are your RSS habits? Do you read content primarily in your RSS reader or on the author’s website? If you do read content in your RSS reader exclusively, are you more or less inclined to comment on a post than if you were reading that same post on the author’s website? And what type of RSS reader do you like to use when you subscribe to feeds? Do you prefer a browser-based reader, an email program with RSS support, a separate application altogether, or a web-based service like Bloglines?

Posted in: Technology, Web Development