I’d like to congratulate Cornell University Photography for embracing RSS. If you go to their website, you will now see a little orange XML box:

If you click on said orange box, rather than being taken to a feed, you are taken to this meta-feed page with another orange box:

If you click on this orange box, identical to the last one except in indirection, you don’t get an RSS feed, because it’s not linked. You have to copy and paste the URL in the page into your browser. Then you can read Cornell University Photo News:

At once, it dawned on me that Cornell University is completely technically incompetent:

• They’re using the wrong feed icon. They should be using this industry standard feed icon
• None of their pages have the feed autodiscovery element, so none of the web will ever find their feed
• You have to click on an icon, then copy paste a URL to view the feed. The icon, dears, should LINK TO THE FEED!!!!!
• The feeds provide a link to a batch of updated content without telling you anything about what’s new

Besides fixing the usability problems of your feed links, the standard look and feel of the feed icon, and the semantic structure of the feed link element, you also need to fix the feed content. Your feed should look this:

5 Responses to “University Photography “embraces” RSS”

1. Corey Chimko says:

   1/24/2007 at 9:30 am

   Wow, you sure are quick on the draw, aren’t you? The feed was announced yesterday and already you have picked it apart. I appreciate creative criticism, perhaps an email with some suggestions, but “completely technically incompetent”? PLEASE.

   In any event, I appreciate some of you criticisms. And I respond as follows:

   1. I have updated the icons on the uphoto pages to reflect the ‘industry standard’.

   2. I have added the feed auto-discovery element to our index page and the ‘meta-feed’ page. (the meta-feed page exists, by the way, for informational purposes because, unlike you, many don’t even know what an RSS feed is, let alone how to subscribe to one.)

   3. The Image Library page is maintained by our vendor, and I will recommend that they also change to the industry-standard icon and enable the auto-discovery feature.

   4. The icon on the meta-feed page DOES link to the feed.

   5. As for feed content, “a link to a batch of updated content” is more than adequate for our current needs. This batch tells you exactly what is new (in case you were wondering, it’s ALL new), and is linked specifically to the referenced pictures in the image library. If you expect that I should be putting the actual images in the feed, you’re dreaming. The sheer volume of images we’re talking about makes such a thing impossible.

   Corey Chimko
   UPhoto/Image Library Webmaster
   cjc85@cornell.edu
   (607) 255-1877

   Reply
2. Elliott Back says:

   1/24/2007 at 6:33 pm

   Unfortunately for me, #5 is the big killer. Without putting individual items into the RSS feed, there’s no reason for me or anyone else to use it. Ever wonder why the tag for a “thing” in the RSS spec is called “item” not “batch of things”? There’s a reason.

   See, as a user, all this RSS feed tells me is that *something* was updated. I don’t really know what, and I have to go to the website itself to find that out. But, as you said, that information is useless because we know the site is high-volume and updating constantly.

   As to your #2 point, no, no, and no. The meta page should *not* exist. You can put a paragraph under or above the RSS icon, and you can use styled RSS with a big header for raw clients, but putting a level of indirection between your site and your feed is a bad idea.

   Reply
3. Corey Chimko says:

   1/25/2007 at 8:21 am

   I think the issue with #5 will eventually resolve itself; right now we are dealing with a huge backlog of photos from 2006 as a result of the elapsed time between when the previous webmaster left and I took over. That is the primary reason for the current daily volume of images. Perhaps when I am caught up I can switch to a descriptive itemization for each job in the feed as the daily volume will be much lower.

   As for #2, like you, I would hope that eventually people and browsers will be technically savvy enough to know how the feeds work, but I think we’re a long way from that yet. Other sites around Cornell with RSS use the same strategy, so we’ll probably stick with that for now.

   Thanks for your feedback.

   Corey Chimko
   UPhoto/Image Library Webmaster
   cjc85@cornell.edu
   (607) 255-1877

   Reply
4. Let Me Post says:

   1/27/2007 at 6:35 pm

   im pretty sure thats not lenorman strong lol. unless he became an old white lady.

   Reply
5. anonymous says:

   2/5/2007 at 9:32 am

   Corey, I would second Elliott’s comments here. This would be a great feed if it delivered meaningful information (i.e. the photos!). If you’re concerned about new users, you might consider the work Dive Into Mark is doing to create user friendly feeds with XSLT. But I also think you’d be surprised to learn how many folks around campus really are using feeds intelligently. We just need more campus publications like yours to give us the content. Keep up the good work!

   Reply