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Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

RSS is certainly still far from being user-friendly, which is
especially evident once you try and left-click on an RSS
subscribe button.

In most cases your browser will simply show the XML code of
the RSS feed … which does not go far in making internet users
comftorable with RSS.

Heck, if you didn’t know what RSS was and clicked on an RSS
button only to get a page full of code you don’t know,
would that aid in turning you in to an RSS user?

Probably no. And much worse, you’d probably never consider
clicking on one of those buttons again, at least not any time
soon.

Consequently, if as a peddler you’re trying to generate RSS
subscribers, simply using an RSS subscribe button is the most terrible
way to go for you and for the RSS industry as a total as well.

So, what alternatives are there?

a] CREATE AN RSS PRESENTATION PAGE

If you’re trying to generate RSS subscribers from your site and
are targeting audiences that might not be farmiliar with RSS,
you need at least a basic presentation of what RSS is on your
site, and you need to link to that either frankly from the RSS
subscribe button or from a place right next to that button,
like you can see on the MarketingStudies.net example.

On this page you should clarify in simple-to-know terms what
RSS is, how your visitors can use it and how they’ll benefit,
and then provide links to some RSS readers and again links to
your RSS feeds.

This page will be instrumental in telling your visitors about
RSS and helping them subscribe to your feeds.

And of course, the feeds themselves and the RSS presentation
page should be promoted in prominent locations on your website,
especially frankly not more than your e-mail e-zine subscription box
and, if you’re publishing topic oriented feeds, next to their
respective topics on the site, just as Lockergnome.com is doing.

B] TRANSFORM AN RSS FEED IN TO XHTML

Having a link to an RSS presentation page right next to your RSS
subscribe button does aid visitors in learning about RSS and
helps them to subscribe, but it still doesn’t solve the problem
of a user really clicking on an RSS feed button. That will
still result in the visitor getting loads of code he really
won’t know what to do with.

Going one step further, you can use XSL Transformations to make
sure that the feed can in fact also be showed in a browser
(without making it useless for an RSS reader as well) … and
that with some bonus information and instructions, such as
a brief overview of RSS and a quick explanation on how the user
can subscribe to this feed via an RSS reader.

I don’t want to get technical here, so to see what I mean simply
click on this link (via FeedBurner):
http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

This is in the end an RSS feed, which has been transformed in
order to be showed in a Web browser with some bonus
information, but can still be subscribed to via every RSS reader
as well.

Some feed maintanance and publishing air force such as FeedBurner
by now provide this functionality “out-of-the-box”, without you
having to do practically anything. All you need to do is
register for their free service, penetrate your feed and then get
this link, which you will place “behind” the RSS subscribe
button on your site, as a link, instead of a direct link to your
RSS feed.

If you don’t want to use a third-party service like FeedBurner,
you can really do the XSL Transformations by yourself. More
information on how to do this is available at Wikiedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xslt).

c] TAKING THE MIDDLE ROAD: SMARTER SUBSCRIBE BUTTONS If you
don’t want to use a third-party service such as FeedBurner or if
your RSS vendor does not provide this functionality or if you
don’t want to be bothered with doing XSLT by yourself, there is
really an alternative you can use.

David Battino at MacDevCenter.com
(http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821) just wrote a simple
piece of code you can use instead of the typical link to your
RSS feed behind the RSS feed subscription button, which will,
after you click on the link, show a simple message saying
that in order to subscribe to the feed you need to copy and
paste this URL in your your RSS reader.

This certainly doesn’t go very far in making RSS more
user-friendly, as the notification really can’t be used to
clarify what RSS is and why your visitors should use it, but it
at least saves the visitor from getting the XML code in his
browser and hating RSS previous to he or she even find out what it is.

The simple code to do so is
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821

Also, do not forget about using buttons like Add To MyYahoo!,
since many MyYahoo! users for example don’t know what RSS is,
but they will use this button to subscribe.

d] TARGETING EXISTING RSS USERS

If you’re targeting existing RSS users or at least users that
won’t be place off by a long list of names they won’t be able to
know, using the free script from Methodize.org might be
the solution.

When the user hovers his mouse above your RSS feed subscribe
button, the script will show a long list of RSS readers that
the visitors can use to frankly subscribe to the feed. By
simply clicking on the appropriate link, the user will quickly
subscribe to the feed with the RSS reader he is currently using.

There’s also a “What’s this” link at the bottom of the list, but
still many visitors will be place off by long list of RSS reader
names they won’t be able to know, previous to even being
motivated enough to click on the “What’s this” link at the
bottom.

But still, if you’re targeting a more technical or internet
oriented audiences, this just might do the trick.

The script is available from here:
http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

e] USING RSS AUTODISCOVERY

RSS Autodiscovery is a very nice feature that allows certain RSS
Autodiscovery-enabled browsers to find a feed on your site and
promptly place forward the subscribe option to the visitor.

While most browsers still do not support this, FireFox for
example does.

Using RSS Autodiscovery can’t substitute the other options
above, but it will serve you well for the small part of your
audience that’s using RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers.

How to use this?

Simply place the following piece of code in to the HEAD section
of the HTML code of your webpages:

[link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/index.xml" /]

And don’t forget to replace the [ and ] characters with .

f] STRONG COPY

No topic how many times we write this, it still needs
repeating. The best way to get your visitors to subscribe is to
entice them to do so with strong copy that provides clear and
valuable benefits, explaining to the visitor exactly why he
needs to subscribe to exactly your RSS feed.