Without adequate user feedback, we’re bound to make the same product development mistakes all over again. Pretty design does not necessarily provide high conversation. Each project, no matter if it’s a website design, a mobile app, or even a newsletter layout, can benefit from comprehensive user feedback. [Read more…]
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Five ways to keep me from unsubscribing to your feed
Ah, RSS feeds- my favorite bit of “push” technology, where the good stuff comes to you, every day, several times a day. Current events, celebrity news, recipes, even Facebook updates, can all be delivered to one place, without having to browse or make new tabs. The question is, with so many wonderful sites out there, how do you keep your RSS subscriptions to a manageable number? [Read more…]
Roll Your Own FriendFeed with Movable Type
There’s been a lot of excitement the last few weeks over FriendFeed, the new lifestreaming service that lets you pull together all the different services you publish to into a single feed.
I’ve tried FriendFeed and it works great, but why ask someone else to do something you could do yourself? The combination of Movable Type and the Action Streams plugin make rolling your own lifestream easy.
Mashing Up Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes may just be in beta, but it’s already a great tool for web publishers that wants to add a bit of more flair and life to their websites. It’s in no way hard to mash up RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes, and I’ll walk you through the most basic way of using the service in this tutorial.
But first of all, why would you want to mash up several RSS feeds into one? Let’s do a list of reasons, shall we?!
- You’ve got a bunch of sites you like and would like to monitor all in one. Mash them up!
- You publish a handful of sites and wants your users to subscribe to them all. Mash them up and offer the feed, through Feedburner if you like!
- You’d like to display relevant stories in your sidebar. Nab the feeds and mash them into one!
That latter one is exactly what we’ll be doing here on the next version of Devlounge, and something I’m adding to the new Wisdump design as I’m writing this.
Let’s Mash Those Feeds
It’s really easy. Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com, click Create a pipe, and sign in with your Yahoo ID (get one if you don’t have one). You get a big grid, a debugger, and stuff to the left for inclusion using drag and drop. Yikes!
So let’s get started then. We want to mashup these feeds:
- Devlounge’s RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Devlounge)
- The Blog Herald’s RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogherald)
- Performancing’s RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/performancing)
- Blogger Jobs’ RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogger-jobs)
We could add more, but that’ll do for now. I’ve collected the feeds as you can see.
Now, let’s add them. Grab the Fetch Feed badge under Sources in the left menu, and drag it top the big grid. A box gets added, and we also get a second box called Pipe Output. That’s where we want the feeds to land.
Let’s add the feeds. Paste the feed URL in the input field within the Fetch Feed box. Then click the + sign thrice beside the URL to get three more input fields. Add the RSS feed URL:s in these.
All these feeds are powered by Feedburner, as you can tell by looking at their URL:s, and the little icon to the left of them.
Good.
Now let’s sort them so that the most recent one is on top. Click Operators to the left, and drag the Sort field to the grid. For this we want to sort by item.pubDate (when the items in the mashed up feeds where published) so we’ll pick that from the first dropdown in the Sort box, and we want it in descending orders so we’ll select that in the second one.
Let’s make something off this! Click the circle in the bottom of the Fetch Feed box, and drag it to the top circle in the Sort box. Voilá, they’re connected! Now do the same from the bottom circle in the Sort box, to the Pipe Output box.
There we are. If you want to test it you can click the Refresh link in the debugger below the grid.
Now click Save in the top right, and name your pipe. When it has finished saving, click Run Pipe at the top of the screen. A new window opens, where you can do stuff with your pipe.
Looks good? Then click Publish to make it accessible. Now, what we want is the pipe’s RSS feed, so click the More options link to the right and Get as RSS.
There you go, one mashed RSS feed containing the latest from four different feeds!
Adding The Feed To Wisdump
So let’s add the feed to Wisdump’s sidebar then, shall we? The pipe’s feed is this: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=bntjQkH73BGSmXmSjknRlg&_render=rss
So how do we add it? With a RSS parsing plugin? We could, but since Wisdump is powered by WordPress, why not just use WordPress’ built-in feed parser? Let’s do that.
This little code snippet is well known, several blogs have reported variants of it. It’s snatched from the RSS feeds in WordPress’ admin.
[html]
items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {
?>
items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 10);
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
?>
[/html]
This will spit out a list where each item in the pipe’s feed is a li
list item, so you’ll probably want to insert an ul
around it.
The key is:
[html]
// insert the feed URL here
$rss = @fetch_rss(‘http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=bntjQkH73BGSmXmSjknRlg&_render=rss’);
[/html]
…where you insert the feed’s URL, and:
[html]
items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 10);
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
?>
[/html]
The number of items you want to display. I went with 10 here.
Here’s the code used in Wisdump’s sidebar:
[html]
-
‘>
News From The Network
items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {
?>
items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 10);
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
?>
[/html]
You can see it in action over at Wisdump (down a bit in the sidebar), which incidentally has got a new design, so check that out too.
Good luck with your feed mashing!
How to Increase RSS Feed Subscribers
What is RSS?
RSS is a type of XML file which includes content from a variety of websites and web services. It allows people to easily track new content being added on sites. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0), RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9), as well as Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91).
Many people have said that RSS is what has really made the web better and more useful, as we can subscribe to data, content and information from just about any website.
My grandmother didn’t understand the usefulness of RSS until I told her that it is like subscribing to the favorite sections of newspapers around the world and having them all delivered to you as new stories are written.
WordPress and RSS
WordPress has many RSS options built into it, but some theme authors have forgotten to add the proper code to the header to make it easy for RSS feed discovery services, like Bloglines, to find.
To insert the feed into the head of your themes, make sure you use the following code:
[php]
RSS Page on the WordPress Codex.
The Tips
Feature Your RSS – If you want to get people to subscribe to your RSS feed, the best way is to feature it the best you can, and as often as you can. If you don’t, people won’t notice it and thus they won’t subscribe.
Write About RSS – I know it seems a bit comical that I am writing a post about RSS and one of my tips to increase RSS subscribers is to write about it, but writing about RSS, or your current subscriber growth is a great way to increase your subscriber base. It is a reminder to those that read the site, but don’t subscribe, that maybe they should.
Give Options – With Feedburner offering both regular subscription options and e-mail subscription options, giving your readers many options can help increase the number of people that subsribe. This also includes giving them multiple feeds. WordPress comes with support for multiple feed formats, and allows users to subscribe to single categories if they so choose.
Hold a Contest – There are many ways to insert information into the RSS feed and you could hold a contest where people had to subscribe in order to find the keyword of the day. Usually, unless you are producing amazing content, most subscribers will quickly disappear once the contest ends.
Consistently Write Great Content – This is by far the most simple tip on the list, but for some people, it is also the most difficult. The reality is that sites that break news, have strong opinions, or teach get more subscribers than other sites.
While great content can be subjective, consistency isn’t. If you publish one original article every day, your RSS subscribers will slowly climb. If you stop posting, they will most likely fall.
Conclusion
As adoption of RSS feed reading continues to pick up steam, you will want to optimize your blog to promote the options people have to subscribe to your site. There is nothing better than having regular readers, and subscribers are more likely to be regular readers than anyone else.
What are your best tips for increasing subscribers?