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#1 2007-02-12 14:39:30

jameslomax
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2005-05-09
Posts: 448
Website

what is rss?

I don’t understand it – what gives?

I think its just a way of gathering content all in one place, so effectively you sign up to multiple streams of content/information in one place, with one piece of software.

But this is what I don’t understand – why do that, and why offer it to people? Web sites are carefully built using colour, graphics etc to support and reflect a ‘style’ or ‘mood’ for your work. So if you make, say, an article column available in rss form, people will read it and not bother to visit your site and not benefit from its graphical style.

I can understand it with fast moving media like daily news, but I can’t see the point of it beyond that.

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#2 2007-02-12 15:06:19

hakjoon
Member
From: Arlington, VA
Registered: 2004-07-29
Posts: 1,634
Website

Re: what is rss?

You don’t have to offer the whole article in the RSS feed, although a lot of people seem to do that, you could always just offer headlines.

It does allows your readers to know that you have updated your site without them having to remember to come to it every day.

Last edited by hakjoon (2007-02-12 15:06:53)


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#3 2007-02-12 16:07:54

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,012
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: what is rss?

jameslomax wrote:

I don’t understand it – what gives?

I think its just a way of gathering content all in one place, so effectively you sign up to multiple streams of content/information in one place, with one piece of software.

But this is what I don’t understand – why do that, and why offer it to people? Web sites are carefully built using colour, graphics etc to support and reflect a ‘style’ or ‘mood’ for your work. So if you make, say, an article column available in rss form, people will read it and not bother to visit your site and not benefit from its graphical style.

I can understand it with fast moving media like daily news, but I can’t see the point of it beyond that.

rss definition
But beyond that you can use the rss feeds to bring the links from one site into another. www.neme.org homepage consists of 3 different feeds from 3 distinct installations

Last edited by colak (2007-02-12 16:09:56)


Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#4 2007-02-12 17:15:04

Neko
Member
Registered: 2004-03-18
Posts: 458

Re: what is rss?

To me, RSS is what Internet newsletters used to be in 90’s: a way to let readers know I’ve published some new contents.

And with all this blogging around, reading is only a little part of a site’s contents: most of it is also comments, community, sharing and trolling. If you want to take part then you have to click on those links inside feeds.

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#5 2007-02-12 19:00:44

squaredeye
Member
From: Greenville, SC
Registered: 2005-07-31
Posts: 1,495
Website

Re: what is rss?

jameslomax,
also, I recommend losing some of that control and letting the users have more. As designers use better symantics and naming conventions users will be able to style pages the way THEY want to. Some sites that not appropriate and for some sites it is. For some sites that look hot, no one would feel the need to touch them, but for sites like gmail, you can see why someone would want to add their own styling.

Same goes for RSS, which is a way of keeping up with multiple hundreds of sites consistently. I follow about 200+ feeds of news, photos, design, inspiration, personal blogs, etc. I’m interested in the content, but if I want to see their design for whatever reason, I’ll visit…

follow me?


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#6 2007-02-13 12:16:42

jameslomax
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2005-05-09
Posts: 448
Website

Re: what is rss?

Yes, its a complex but interesting subject. Design + information + control + psychology + personal ownership of a web site, and what you want to do with it.

One of the things I’ve started to think though, in relation to my own work (content), is I don’t want some features of this internet medium. If I have to write short, snappy, abbreviated writing that’s a disservice to the subject in question – which might be complex and sophisticated – then bah, I will ignore the rules about short attention span etc. and the ‘internet style’ we’re all supposed to adopt…..and just write the best I can, regarldess of whether it ‘works’ on the internet or not. I don’t want to fit the medium, if in the process it means a dumbing-down of content. And it occurs to me, when the internet is so prevalent and still growing, that it could have undesirable consequences: more and more, people producing ‘dumbed down’ content to fit the medium, and doing it so much they forget how to do more in-depth work, and forget how to appreciate it.

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#7 2007-02-13 13:53:41

hcgtv
Plugin Author
From: Key Largo, Florida
Registered: 2005-11-29
Posts: 2,722
Website

Re: what is rss?

ma_smith wrote:

Same goes for RSS, which is a way of keeping up with multiple hundreds of sites consistently. I follow about 200+ feeds of news, photos, design, inspiration, personal blogs, etc. I’m interested in the content, but if I want to see their design for whatever reason, I’ll visit…

Makes me wonder if spending so much time on the styling of a site is worth it these days, since most interested parties are visiting via the feeds and never get to see the pixel dance.

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#8 2007-02-13 17:46:03

Mary
Sock Enthusiast
Registered: 2004-06-27
Posts: 6,236

Re: what is rss?

I use my feed reader as a way of filtering through what I want to read. If the article is longer than a couple paragraphs and I find it interesting, I view it on the site rather than in my feed reader.

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