Think Outside the Feed

Thoughts on the emerging use of RSS by Bill French and F. Andy Seidl, Co-founders of MyST Technology Partners.
February 27, 2005

Tips for High Quality RSS Feeds

Here are 7 things that will improve the quality of your RSS feeds and may lead to greater use and wider visibility.

Tip #1

Always validate your feeds from time-to-time. Even though your feeds are probably auto-generated, it's a good idea to test them because you never know what that last copy-and-paste did in your authoring environment.

Tip #2

Make sure the channel tag includes a URL back to the source of the RSS content. Linking to your home page is not a good idea unless the feed emanates from the content of the home page.

Tip #3

Include both a copyright comment and copyright tag in the channel element. The comment should contain your contact information and any terms of use (see example). 

Tip #4

Include an image element in your feed and make sure it includes an image that meets RSS specifications.

Tip #5

Check the links in your RSS feed from time-to-time, especially when providing full-text content in the feed.

Tip #6

Do not use HTML in the title tags. This is a big problem because by design, XML documents are intended to be used in many ways.

Tip #7

Include a detailed description of your RSS feed in the channel description element.

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February 19, 2005

RSS to PDF: What's Next?

This is a great idea and suggests how useful RSS can be.

If Adobe is getting behind RSS, it's a good sign that this format is permeating every aspect of publishing.

Robin's right - this is another arrow for the NewsMaster's quiver. The ability to create a aseamless process where RSS can flow into annotations, reports, etc - all good stuff.

Imagine RSS to anything...

Syndication OptionsRSS (Rich Site Summary) Feed Atom Feed OPML (Outline Processor Language) Feed MYST-ML (MyST Markup Language) Content Feed MS-Office Smart Tag Subscription