RSS Part 2: do you check your own RSS feeds?

[Gena01]

So i've been using Google Reader for some time now. It has been quite a learning experience. It also has been quite positive and a lot better than the days of having a ton of tabs open and trying to stay on top of all the great stuff happening in the blogosphere.

A couple of observations though:
1. Some sites do not provide RSS feeds at all (which is a pity).
2. Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) is great for many many reasons. Some of these include:
 a. It takes over delivering most of the traffic (offloading your server) and caching the RSS feed.
 b. It's able to convert and make sure that the delivered content is valid for many various RSS readers.
 c. It provides a great way to analyze your RSS feed subscriptions and track articles.
 d. It allows you to add links to each RSS post to make it easier to spread the word about the great stuff you are sharing through RSS feed.
 e. You can combine FeedBurner with Adsense to get the benefits of both products.
3. Some sites that do provide RSS feeds do not provide full content to the article right in the feed and expect others to click on the link to read the full article. However it's not always obvious from the RSS item that the article is not complete and that there's more to it than what I am seeing in Google Reader. This one is quite annoying. I would love to see full content in the RSS feed. I would love to know that the article is a summary or a partial content that will continue once I follow the link. This is not obvious and I tend to play a guessing game of whether this is all the author wanted to say or there's actually a more detailed article.

If you run a site or a blog that provides RSS feeds do "eat your own dogfood" (check your own feeds) and see if there's anything that could be confusing or broken. Also don't forget to validate (http://feedvalidator.org/) your RSS feeds. There's also a number of RSS validators. I would recommend to use more than one just to make sure that you have your feed covered and didn't miss anything.

P.S. I also wanted to mention BetaNews/Fileforum RSS feeds. BetaNews and Fileforum just went through a full redesign. They also provide RSS feeds. However the content in the actual feed is useless. There's a ton of stuff posted and the requirement to click and open each one defeats the purpose of using RSS altogether since I still need to open up each item in a separate tab/window just to see more information about the new item or program release. On a separate note it looks like the "Changelog" that was so useful when trying to stay on top of software releases is totally missing in the new design of the website. So if you are curious to see what changed you need to research that somewhere else.

See Also: RSS feeds and what you should know about them (http://www.gena01.com/forum/gena01_blog/rss_feeds_and_what_you_should_know_about_them-t243.0.html).

Gena01

[Mxx]

Now all you need to do is start using http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/launched/read-it-later/ and you'll be all set.  
it integrates with google reader too and we should find a way to read all that stuff from your bb

[Mxx]

check out http://www.betanews.com/article/Betanews_Alpha_is_now_on_RSS/1232388223

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