The Bamboo Project Blog

Great Beginner's Guide to RSS

Via Darren Rowse, a really nice Beginner's Guide to RSS. You may want to add this link to your site RSS guide and/or use it to explain to RSS newbies how the whole thing works. It includes the Common Craft RSS in Plain English video, one of the best explanations I've seen, plus some other videos on how to use RSS, links to various readers, etc. Good stuff.

An Introduction to Netvibes: Alex Miller's Screencast

If you've been around the Bamboo Project for long, you know that I'm a BIG fan of Netvibes. It's the backbone of my personal learning environment and I also see a lot of other uses for it, both personally and professionally. It's easy to use, has a great interface, and is much more than simply an RSS feed reader.

But reading about it is never as good as seeing it. Which is why I'm happy to share with you Alex Miller's quick screencast on Netvibes. It shows you the basics, including how easy it is to add a feed, the tabs feature of which I'm so fond, and how you can share tabs with others. She recorded it using Jing, which I've been hearing a lot about lately, but haven't had a chance to try. If you've been considering Netvibes at all, I highly encourage you to check out Alex's screencast. It's an excellent use of the next three minutes!

Have You RSS-Enabled Your Site? And If You Have, Can Readers Find Your Feeds?

While I think that many people are starting to get the idea of subscribing to RSS feeds to update themselves on the latest news and information in their field, I realized the other day that a lot of nonprofits haven't mastered the other side of the RSS equation--enabling RSS in their own sites so that others can sign up for automatic updates.  A few recent examples from my own work:

• I'm developing a web site for one of my clients. They regularly receive email updates from a state  agency and wanted to share these updates on their site. I suggested that we might be able to capture the government agency's RSS feed so that this information could automatically be updated on my client's site without my client having to upload or manually enter the information. However, as it turns out, not a single section of the state agency's site is RSS-enabled--not even the "What's New" section or the sections that are regularly updated with statistical data. The only way for me to get information is to visit their site.
  

• I'd like to develop a Netvibes page for the sector in which I work that could be shared with management and front-line staff. Unfortunately, the professional organizations, government agencies and most of the nonprofits in this sector have not enabled RSS on their sites, so there's little to put into the start page.

At first I thought this was just my own sector, so I started doing some Google searches on "nonprofit" to see a cross section of sites. Guess what? A significant number of them didn't have RSS either.

I expected this with smaller organizations, but was surprised to see it with larger nonprofits like this regional chapter of the Red Cross, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and even a pretty sophisticated site, like the American Lung Association. Although with the American Lung Association you can at least sign up for email updates.

I haven't figured out why this is going on. Part of this is ignorance, I'm sure--although it's a little scary to think that some of these larger organizations and state agencies don't know about RSS yet.

Even scarier is the possibility that these organizations know about RSS, but have chosen to not enable their sites. This is a shame, not only because this means organizations are losing out on creating an ongoing relationship with visitors to their sites by providing relevant, regularly updated content delivered directly to readers, but also because using RSS will increase a site's ranking in search engines.

In some cases, I can understand why RSS hasn't been enabled. If you run a site that's brochure-ware and, therefore, rarely updated, then RSS becomes less important. But this is a problem in and of itself because organizations that don't regularly add new content to their sites are in danger of being ignored altogether. If you're not regularly providing useful information online, then that's something you should seriously re-evaluate.

Another thing I observed--even those sites that had RSS didn't make it easy to sign up. A couple of examples of what I mean.

First, the Pew Charitable Trust site:

 

As you can see, you can sign up for an email alert, but there's nothing to suggest RSS--unless you click on the link to the News Room. From there, you can then link to their RSS feeds. That's burying the feeds pretty deeply in the site, making it hard for someone to find them. 

Another confusing site, to a newbie at least, was the American Cancer Society. Note the little XML button at the bottom of the "In the News" section. The problem is that a lot of people have no idea what that little orange XML means.

Ironically, when you click on the button at the Cancer Society site, you're actually taken to a nicely done page that explains RSS, how to sign up for a reader, etc. It's just that you won't learn about RSS unless you click on the button and if you don't know about RSS, you're not likely to click on the button in the first place.

Some RSS Best Practices

This exercise made me realize that we should be identifying some best practices in using RSS. A couple that spring to mind:

• Make RSS appropriate for your site by regularly updating content. At a minimum, try to have a "What's New" section of your site. Ideally, you would make several sections of your site more useful to people by providing updated content, including an organizational blog.
  

• RSS-enable your site. If you're using blogging software, this is usually done automatically. But if you're having a web developer work on your site, then you will need to speak to them about enabling RSS. Also consider allowing people to receive updates via email if you're not already doing this.
  

• Create a brief guide to RSS that explains to users what RSS is, how to sign up, etc. This is a decent example that you can work from. You might also want to include the Common Craft Video, RSS in Plain English, which explains RSS as well as anything I've seen. You can see how I did it here.
  

• Prominently feature a link to your RSS feed and your RSS Guide on the Home page of your site. Make it very visible and make it understandable for newbies--something like "Sign up for automatic updates" or "Get notified every time we update our site."

• Promote your feeds everywhere. You might want to check out this post on 11 Ways to Find New Subscribers for Your Blog. Most of these great tips can be applied to any site.

So here are the big questions for the day

• Is your organization's web site RSS-enabled?

• If if isn't, why haven't you set this up?

• If it is, how easy is it for visitors to find and sign up for your feed(s)?

Serializing Your Content With FeedCycle

I was checking out the Open  Learn project this morning (a topic worthy of its own blog post) and came across their competition to remix/reuse their content, which led me to an interesting little tool--Feedcycle. 

Feedcycle enables you to publish serialized RSS feeds. In other words, subscribers can sign up to receive a series of blog posts, podcasts, videocasts, etc. automatically delivered daily. As subscribers sign up, they will be sent the first item in the series, then the next, etc. regardless of when they sign up for the service. Subscribers can use any of the most popular readers, including Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, etc.

As you can see from the example, your subscribers will get details on the length of the series and items to expect. They can also add to their preferred reader using a chicklet.

This is a great way to provide chunks of content that should be in some kind of linear format (for example staff training, blog series, etc,). It's also obviously a great way to tell a story. It works best for content that isn't "fresh"--that is information that would be valuable to offer in a serialized format on a permanent basis.

There's a free version that's pretty generous, as well as premium/paid versions. More on pricing and features here.

I haven't had a chance to give it a try yet, but this TechCrunch article is pretty positive about the service. I'll be off for the next several days, so I may use some of that time to think more about how to use this for some projects I'm working on and to do additional research on the tool. Mostly wanted to share because it looks like such a cool option.