Ignoramus27036 wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:16:08 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
>> Ignoramus27036 wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks a lot for your help. I also regret that I did not develop good
>>> features for a few years, not doing the right things (partly because we
>>> had a kid).
>>>
>>> I placed your button on http://www.algebra.com/.
>>
>> Okay, I was going to remain quiet, but I feel like I must suggest an
>> improvement.
>
> Always appreciated.
>
>> The placement of the botton in the front page is excellent, but all/most
>> pages below that level do not bring up the orange goodness in the status
>> bar of Firefox. If it is work in progress, then fine. Otherwise, you
>> might want to use a little Linux script to recursively add a feed link to
>> all HTML files. It would be painless. I already coded up the darn thing.
>
> Let me describe my thought process a little bit. I started off with
> four feeds (new site feature announcements, newly submitted unsolved
> problems, newly solved problems, and new contents added).
>
> Because I had four different feeds, I did not want to "spam" all my
> pages with am XML link to an arbitrary feed, cutting off other
> feeds. instead, I placed links to relevant feeds to pages that
> logically are related to the feeds. For example, I have a page where
> tutors can review newly submitted unsolved problems, and solve
> whichever ones they want. On that page, I placed a link to, drumroll,
> the unsolved problems feed. I also have a page with recently solved
> problems, with a link to the solved problems feed.
>
> As of this morning, I also added a combined "Algebra.Com News" feed,
> which is comprised of the last 5 site feature update announcements,
> last 5 new content updates, last 10 unsolved problems and last 10
> solved problems.
See my comment at the bottom of this message.
> I feel that this is fairly acceptable for placing on all pages as a
> header link element, where a link to another feed is not defined.
>
> I am not sure what's the benefit of that though. Would that not dilute
> the attention paid to more proper RSS feeds?
No. A very small percentage of your visitors will subscribe anyway --
probably a fraction of a percent. This fraction might account for thousand
of hits over the long run. Get these people subscribed now. You are not
punishing them. It is not a mailing list so it takes 5 second to
unsubscribe at will.
>> Some people must be entering your site at a deep level, e.g. after
>> searching the Web. You ought to encourage them or at least give them the
>> possibility to subscribe. You will then have them return.
>
> That's a great point.
>
> Making a site wide change of adding a default RSS button, where a more
> specific one is not provided, is equivalent to adding one line of perl
> to one module in my system.
Yes, I can imagine you already have something to pull 'off the shelf'
already. Needless to mention, a /generic/ feed needs to be assigned to all
pages, which makes it anything _but_ spamming (informative rather). Also
assign a title to the feed at the header: something like 'Algebra.com
announcements' or 'Algebra.com news'. You probably not want such a feed to
be too active, e.g. more than one update per day.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
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