How RSS is both under- and overrated

Written on May 20, 2008 – 1:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Growth of RSS subscribers on TheNextWeb.org

My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.

Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.

What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?

Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.

With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.

Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?

As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…

I hope you like that post!

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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compatibility, css, feeds, html, rss, seo, webdesign

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com and The Next Web Conference & Blog.

Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers,...

5 comments/trackbacks to “How RSS is both under- and overrated”

Aug 4, 2008: Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video)
[...] story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things [...]

By Oblomov on May 20, 2008

Hi,

Nice and interesting point. I’m subscribed to a lot of feeds and use the “next” button from google-reader to jump from post to post. This way I always visit the webpage instead of reading the post in a RSS reader.
On your point on adjusting your HTML and CSS to make sure posts are viewed correctly in various readers, I would like to say that the responsibility on that point should be with the creators of those readers, not with the web designers/builders. A lot of extra hours are already spent on making sure a site looks good in firefox and internet explorer, it would be almost undoable to do the same for every rss-reader out there!

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 20, 2008

In theory you are right. But the same should be true about browsers. And in reality each browser has a slightly different interpretation of the standards that were set to prevent any differences in the first place. Same goes for RSS. Sure, it would be great if every RSS reader would show everything exactly the same as every other RSS reader. But don’t count on it…

[Reply]
By Bob Boynton on May 21, 2008

Please don’t make the ‘huge’ pictures smaller. If that chart was any smaller we — whether via your blog or rss — would have a hard time getting much from it. The people who are reading your blog surely have fast network connections. That makes larger pictures feasible, and being able to look at them makes larger better.

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 21, 2008

Thanks Bob, I wish there was a way to offer small and big pictures without using lowsrc and saving two images for everything. Can’t please all the people all the time…

[Reply]

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