Comments on: University Photography “embraces” RSS

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:32:08 +0000

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!

By: Let Me Post

Let Me Post — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:35:36 +0000

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

By: Corey Chimko

Corey Chimko — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:21:37 +0000

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

By: Elliott Back

Elliott Back — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:33:13 +0000

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.

By: Corey Chimko

Corey Chimko — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:30:21 +0000

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