Addicted to feeds - the power of RSS

Usually I’m quite a stubborn donkey when it comes to taking on new technology or ideas. A curious donkey, but a donkey nevertheless.

When I first heard about this whole RSS business I was suspicious. Wasn’t quite sure how to use it, and why would I need it in the first place. A few years passed by and now it’s one of my indispensable tools.

The benefits of RSS

So what is it about Really Simple Syndication that makes it such a necessity?

One of the main advantages of RSS is the fact that it notifies you about changes, rather than you having to periodically check a website for updates.

This might not seem like such a big deal. What’s the problem with checking a few websites every day, or every week. Well I don’t know about you, but I have a memory like Swiss cheese. This means that unless the content is updated almost daily, I’m bound to forget to check a few times, and eventually forget the url even.

It becomes especially prominent when instead of checking 5 websites you follow 500. It’s a bit of an exaggeration but allows you to see the point clearly. Some of your feeds might have new content daily, some weekly and some even monthly.

Not every author is extremely prolific, or you might be just following the release information for some software. You definitely want to know when it comes out but if the news comes about every 5 months, but at the same time you do not want to waste your time every single day checking for it.

Secondly you might not be interested in every single article from one author. If someone writes about apples and oranges, and you hate apples, why would you want to waste your time checking out an article about them? This is why RSS can act as a great information filter. Because you see the article titles, you can quickly decided whether it is something that might interest you or not.

This also leads to my next point. By using an RSS reader you can aggregate and consolidate your many information sources in one place.

Also as the reader only presents you with the text content of the article itself (or a summary, depending on the publishers settings) you save on loading many different websites with all their graphics and other unrelated page elements. This saves bandwidth as well as time.

Why should you provide RSS feeds?

Considering all the above arguments it should be clear that it is of great benefit to your readers as well as you as a writer to supply RSS feeds of your content.

Some people do worry that it takes away visitors from the site. However this is not entirely true. Readers will come to comment, or to just check out your other articles from the archive. So if your content is good enough to attract a response from a reader, you have nothing to fear.

If this still does not convince you, there is another way of getting people onto your website, while still providing feeds. You could always create RSS feeds with just your article summary and a “read more” link. This way your followers get a nudge that there is fresh content, they can see the title and an intro that gives them an idea of what the content is about, and you still get your traffic. Simple, and everyone is happy.

Websites without RSS

All the above ranting is due to my recent web browsing. I have been checking out a couple of sites and blogs, and found a few that looked like they might be worth following. Unfortunately to my surprise an RSS feed was nowhere to be found. And in my book this is a definite no-no. The content would have to be truly outstanding  and often updated for me to be able to keep coming back to a site like that. And I do not think I am alone in such attitude.