If you know all about RSS syndication and social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, this post is not for you. (Although you’re welcome to read it, if you’d like!)
This post is also not intended for someone looking for a complete and exhaustive introduction to syndication and social bookmarking. Instead, it is meant to be a gentle introduction and to get you started at least thinking about these useful services.
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while so I could link to it from the “Subscribe” area of the sidebar. My guess is that a lot of movingtofreedom.org visitors know these topics, so it hasn’t been a priority. But I found myself tinkering with the subscription sidebar box, and now seemed like a good time. Even being fairly technical myself, it was a long time before I was curious enough to figure out what syndication was all about, so I think it’s possible that one or two people may appreciate this. If this is boring old stuff to you, well, you were already warned so why are you still reading?
“More, more, more. How do you like it? How do you like it?”
Do you like it, by the way? I spaced things out so it wouldn’t look so forbidding. So that it might even look enticing enough to lure in new subscribers. I added a reader count to show the number of regular subscribers. (Well, it only shows the number of subscribers from the previous day. I’ll say more about this thing in a bit.)
Subscribers are important to me because I’m needy and desperate for attention and that number is a validation of my personal worth. So please subscribe and help me to feel better about myself. So how do you do that? Let’s look at some of the items in the subscription box, numbered for your convenience. It may change tomorrow or the next day, but it all matches up at least for this one brief shining moment.
1. Email Subscription
This one is pretty straightforward. Everyone knows what email is: it’s what old people use to communicate on the Internet.
I use FeedBurner to manage my subscriptions. If you click on the “subscribe by email” link, it will take you to a page at feedburner.com where you can supply your email address. There is currently a CAPTCHA image for you to identify, and then you need to respond to the verification email that comes out, and that’s it. You’re subscribed. You’ll get an email with my deathless prose on the days that new posts appear.
I’ll treat emails collected in this way the same as described for comments in the privacy policy of this web site. That is, I won’t sell or give them away voluntarily. You should read FeedBurner’s privacy policy for yourself if you have any concerns about how they will use your email address. At the initial writing of this post, it states that they will not share it or send unsolicited emails.
One problem with the FeedBurner email subscription service is that it strips out special HTML codes in the posts. These codes apply to apostrophes, double-quotes, and em-dashes, among other things, so it is quite unfortunate. You’ll be happy to know that I’m pursuing a solution for the problem on your behalf.
2. Syndication Feeds
These are slightly more complicated than an email subscription. Syndication feeds are a standard way for web sites to publish out data. They are especially useful for sites that change regularly (like blogs), to allow you to keep up with updates. This stream of updates is the “feed.” What does that mean? Why not just use the web browser to keep up with a site?
Let me give an example. Suppose I’m interested in about 20 blogs and news sites. Some of them are updated daily, and some once a week or even once a month. Some are updated irregularly. It can take me a long time to click on 20 bookmarks every day, or however often I check on them. And it can be annoying to keep checking a site that hardly ever updates. If only there was some way I could use a single program or web page to keep an eye on all 20 pages…
And that’s what syndication is all about: standard formats that “feed readers” (also called news aggregators) can access and provide you with a convenient way to keep track of your web sites. When you see references to RSS or Atom/XML, these are just different flavors of syndication. RSS and Atom are the two big ones, and all the major feed readers can handle either format. In addition to the feeds for new posts, you can also subscribe to a feed for comments, which allows you to keep track of all the fascinating discussions going on here.
There are a few things you’ll need to learn to use a feed reader effectively, but it’s well worth the effort. Which kind of feed reader should you use? There are many good ones. I used to use Sage, which is a plugin for Firefox. It’s very nice, but one big shortcoming for me was that it doesn’t show how many unread items there are for each feed, so you still have to click around more than you might like. I’m currently using Google Reader, which is a free service from Google, and it’s just a web page so it’s pretty easy to try out. Bloglines is another web-based reader that is very popular.
Feed readers can import and export OPML files that hold all your feed addresses, which is convenient for backups, and saves you from getting locked in to web services like Google’s and Bloglines.
3. Subscriber Count
If you read blogs much, it won’t be long before you run in to the FeedBurner FeedCount “chicklet.” That’s the little orange box with the number of readers for the blog. (It can be customized to other colors.) What does it mean? For web sites that use FeedBurner, the feed comes from the feedburner.com web site. They analyze who uses the feed and give you the count. It’s not a simple thing to get an accurate count of actual subscribers, so it’s very nice that they provide this service for free and are helpful when you ask questions or have problems. The count is the combined number of feed and email subscribers.
Note that in my numbered example image, I have the modest number of 28 subscribers. Some people recommend waiting to make your number public until you’ve reached some more impressive number like 50 or 100. As if you might say, I’m not going to hang around or subscribe to this loser’s web site where he only has 28 subscribers. I’m not worried about that. I know you’re not that shallow. And just think of the stories you’ll tell about how you were one of the first 100 subscribers to movingtofreedom.org.
One more thing about the count is that it represents the number of subscribers from the previous day, so it can fluctuate a bit from day to day. I wish they had an option to pick the average from the last 7 or 30 days. On the other hand, all you people who are going to subscribe today will already be counted tomorrow.
4. Social Bookmarking
This is an icon for saving a bookmark of www.movingtofreedom.org to del.icio.us. That’s a web site that allows you to save and share bookmarks with others. It can be a good promotional tool: if a lot of people bookmark a site, it can show up prominently in a popular list and send people your way.
So I have the icon there as a hint/nudge for people to hopefully bookmark me and help round up some new visitors.
There’s more to be said about social bookmarking, but we’ll save that for another day. I wrote a long piece about del.icio.us a while back, and a follow-up is due as I’ve learned more about social bookmarking and my attitudes and ideas about it have changed.
5. Question Mark
Leads to this page, where it can now be revealed that the answer is 42.
6. Feed Icon
This comes from the home of the standard web feed icon. It’s supposed to “eliminate confusion,” “break down international barriers,” and “bring feeds to the forefront.” Anyway, if it helps to draw your eye to the “Subscribe!” area and leads you to this wonderful little introduction and maybe then to actually subscribe, that’s just fabulous.
Some people suggest bigger is better and use this gigantic icon next to #6 here or an even more humongous one as part of their web site theme. I think that may be a touch on the excessive side.
Does any of this make any sense?
Please give me your feedback. If you didn’t know anything about web syndication when you started, did this post help? If you already knew about it, did I mangle the explanation?
Are you going to subscribe now?
Related: just de-lovely, and del.icio.us
(Thanks to Lisa Pertile for the great pictures, freely shared under the CC-BY-SA-v2.5 license.)
2 Comments
Three remarks.
One: your feed icon is unusually small, at least for us Firefox users: 10×10 instead of the more typical 24×24 or 32×32. May even be hard to click on for people with big resolutions (the lucky b*@&ards).
Two: the choice of the word “subscription”, however appropriate, is somewhat unfortunate; people have gotten rather used to associating the words “subscribe” and “subscription” on any kind of link with someone sticking their hand in their pocket. Usually, unless you’re willing to give some dubious, anonymous web site operator your credit card number, such links are dead-ends — except when they’re links to feeds, of course…
Three: I doubt feed readers will really come into their own until it’s possible to compose a comment in one and easily submit it. Unfortunately, any API for doing so is likely to be a link spam magnet, so it’ll never happen …
26 November 2006 at 1:10 am
Hi, Nemo. I think your browser must have have cached the smaller image that was there before. I used the same filename for the new 24×24 feed icon. After seeing your comment I changed the filename so that should force the new one to be used. Thanks for pointing it out.
Good point about the subscription language. I suppose I could put “(For Free!)” or something like that, although I’m not sure where I’d slip that in. Will have to think about it.
Feeds do have a pretty low recognition factor. I think I saw in slashdot a link to a study that found 6% of people were aware of them. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have a post introducing them, although I’d guess more than 6% of the audience for this site knows about RSS, etc.
They are so convenient for keeping track of web sites that I think people would appreciate them if they understood their utility, and if they tend to read a lot of blogs and news sites. So maybe they’ll catch on more if blogs continue to gain in popularity and people begin to read more and more of them.
26 November 2006 at 7:27 pm