I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting.
The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why:
- RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing the point. It’s another delivery channel for your content. You wouldn’t sign up people for a newsletter where you just send a message saying “I’ve got a new post up. Go read it.” The same should apply to your RSS feed.
- RSS getting treated like an afterthought. Cool, you added some neat integration with some external service! Did you look to see what happens to those posts in your RSS feed? A lot of the time it’s literally a blank post. Other times it’s malformed junk missing any context of what’s supposed to be there.
- RSS getting misconfigured. There’s a lot of implementations of RSS feeds for different static site generators and blogging engines and CMS’s out there, but a lot of them feel like they were implemented so they could add “RSS support” to their checklist. As a result, you get blogs where every time they make a new post, every single post on their site gets marked as updated in RSS. In most of the cases I’ve bothered checking, basically the
lastBuildDateis getting populated with the last date the site was built, rather than the last date that specific content was updated.
I keep hoping some of these folks will fix their systems and approaches, but I think I’m going to have to do a cull sometime soon. Depending on your RSS reader, some of this may be more noticeable than others, but for me, I’ve had enough.