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Re: Missing RSS??

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:44:00 +0100, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Thanks Roy. I do not know if I will do it this way, but I might. 

The possibilities for default feed are either the "new features" rss
feed with one update per day, or "Algebra News" with a little of
everything (site updates, problems etc), which is a lot of messages
per day.

i


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