I don’t fly often, but on the rare occasions that I do unfortunatelly my airline choice is very limited. My quite common route is London (UK) - Poznań (Poland) and to my despair the choice in basically between Wizzair and Ryanair. There used to be a British Airways direct connection, though it seems it isn’t available anymore, and admittedly it was more pricey than the first two.

There are two reasons for this topic today. Firstly Easter is coming so I had to book my flights recently to not end up with some ridiculous rates. Secondly I found an interesting article on the Guardian’s website about one of the two cheap lines. If it wasn’t so outrageous, it might have actually been funny… here is a quote:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

This was the official response from Ryanair after a small affair has been started online by the airline’s employee’s inappropriate blog pots comments. Admittedly Ryanair as well as its owner are know to be less than polite on many occasions, and not really fussed about customer service, often using their “strive to have the lowest fares” as a facade for rudeness and lack of comforts and amenities.

Since the whole luggage fees thing started I usually opted for Wizzair over Ryanair even if it meant spending a few more pounds. Because at the end of the day I got a higher baggage limit and their “extra fees” on top of the ticket price have been more reasonable. However as we have found out last Christmas there is one flaw on the route I take - the return flights all depart at 6am…

This means leaving my parents house at 3am, which maybe wouldn’t be such a big thing for my partner and I, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is only possible if my parents drive us there… In the end it means everyone gets no sleep.

So in order to make the journey slightly more reasonable this time we went with Ryanair. And it quickly reminded me why I was choosing Wizzair before. Just to start with the hideous booking process which seems to do everything to discourage you from choosing an optimum date and time. With all the hyped claims of doing everything to lower the prices and cut costs “for the customer” the booking does quite the opposite.

You need quite some willpower and determination to click through the dates one by one to compare prices. In our case we take holiday according to our flights, so we have some flexibility when it comes to what day we will be departing. And very often a day sooner or later can mean significant savings. I always liked Wizzair’s weekly preview, it definitely helps you judge prices easily, no need to memorise all your possible departure and arrival combinations just to make a choice. Not to mention that if you click next or previous day to many times in a row the website will just happily throw an error at you, that most of the time means starting the whole booking process all over again.

However in the end this time with a difference in prices and convenient flight times, I crawled through the booking process on Ryanair’s website. Just to be shocked by the luggage prices! Both cheap lines had these extra costs before, but it was just a couple of quid. This time Ryanair was asking  £14 per bag per passenger. Well, with this surcharge, the tickets would no longer be that cheap especially considering there’s also a Visa charge…

In the end we decided to fly with just hand luggage, however ever since I have been wondering about loads of things, whether we can take them in the bag or not. I might actually need to send Easter presents in the post - not a big deal considering the package cost will be less than the baggage charge…

I didn’t like Ryanair before reading the article, but I think that little bit of unnecessary rudeness is too much for me. Looks like we will be joining the “say no to Ryanair” bunch after our farewell flight during Easter.

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.