Brian Sweeting

As I recently mentioned, I syndicated the news and the upcoming events on the Spanish Fork Website. I placed two semi-standard orange XML buttons (in each of these sections on the homepage) which linked to their respective RSS feeds.

This morning I received some negative reaction to this from some people at Spanish Fork City. The problem as they related it was, “What is this orange XML button for? All I get is jibberish when I click on it”. Now when I decided to provide these RSS feeds I didn’t run it past these people because I just figured that they would think it was so cool to provide this sort of service. It didn’t occur to me that I would get a negative reaction over it.

This caused a moment of clarity for me, that (in my utter geekdom) I realized that I was in the vast minority when it comes to understanding the value of RSS. Although RSS has been around for some time now, it is still largely underused. Even I had never really used it until I started this weblog and Trillian Pro came out with an RSS Viewer plug-in.

We came to a compromise that instead of the XML button, I would provide a small link at the bottom of the news and events sections called “Syndication”. There I would briefly explain the concept of syndication and provide links to all of the feeds. This would have probably been the appropriate way to do it in the first place.

So the lesson I have for those wanting to provide RSS feeds is to remember that the driver behind wanting to provide these feeds is probably because you understand the concept and see the value of RSS. This fact makes you a very, very small percentage of the population of your users…especially for a government site. So make sure to educate your users in the process of providing these feeds.