kadyellebee: Six tips to better RSS

Six Tips for better RSS feeds

Whether you use RSS for full content syndication, headline notification, or some other purpose, these tips should help you create a better feed.

This is an interesting set of tips - and made me take a look at my feed to see how I was doing. I try hard to make sure my RSS feed is valid. But here’s my thoughts on each tip.

[via anything but ordinary]

Tips are taken directly from the article linked above.

Write a great headline - I’m not nearly as good at this as I should be. Looking back through my archives and seeing a lot of general entries titled "stuff and things" or "today". A while back, I had a fairly fixed layout, and so I tried to keep my titles shorter to make it not break. I guess I’m still in that mode.
Include full article or summary - Doing good on that. Ahhh, I just noticed that my extended entries weren’t showing up for kadyellebee entries, so I fixed that now.
Don’t cut off your articles - Okay, not a prob.
Be consistent - I try.
Use RSS 2.0 - Although I have several options linked, the 2.0 version is the one that I have tested more, and added extra features to. I want to add an Atom version, too, but I haven’t yet.
Link to your comments - Yep. Do you want to, too? Inside the <item> container, add this:
```
<comments><$MTEntryLink encode_xml="1"$>#comments</comments>
```
Assuming that you have an anchor pointing to your comments in your Individual Archives.
In FeedDemon, this shows up as a cute little comment bubble below the entry (depending on the style you are using in FD, it may show a text "comments" link).

Oh, and another thing I thought of - my main feed now has kadyellebee and express links posts in it, so that it matches my kadyellebee main index. I hope that’s a nice thing for some people who want to see everything I’m talking about.

Comments

I don’t use a feed reader, so it’s nice to see tips on how to make my RSS feed better for people who might actually be using it. I just implemented the comments link. Thanks.

Posted by: Brandy | February 12, 2004 04:24 PM

I implemented mine last night. Thank you. But I’m curious as to why the link name isn’t "comment" instead of "#comment". Does it have to be like that to get the little comment balloon?