RSS

NetNewsWire now stops slaying your computer (and it's free, too)

Posted 21 Jan 2008 by Laura Scott

One of my biggest frustrations with NetNewsWire was that it scaled horribly. When starting the application, it would take several minutes to load -- not to refresh the feeds, but just to load all the feeds. My poor MacBook Pro would whirr away from all the work it took, and if on battery would drain it within 10 minutes.

Simply put, it was the laptop killer. I used it only very sparingly, and only when I needed to cull through a zillion posts for my BlogHer Contributing Editor gig.

But on January 9th, NewsGator Technologies updated the application with a major refactoring. Just check out the change notes:

Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

W00t!

RSS best practices

Posted 23 Nov 2007 by Laura Scott

Beth Kanter points to Skelliewag's post with a hype-filled title: "How To Get 1,050 Subscribers in 3 Months":

1. Work out who your target audience is and write your content exclusively for them.

2. Pack your articles with as much value as possible. If time is a problem, post less.

3. Source out your target audience by getting or making links and writing for social media.

I'd also add a 4th point or perhaps add something to point 2. Find a unique view on your topic. I learned about this from a personal branding session at BlogHer I attended this summer.

Can we talk about RSS abuse?

Posted 29 Apr 2007 by Laura Scott

I have a little complaint about, well, maybe it's not "abuse" in literal fact, but it certainly does not fall into "best practices" when it comes to publishing RSS feeds: post-dating posts so that they stay at the top of people's feed readers.

It seems to happen quite often. As I write this, this post by Richard Morse on Huffington Post has been sitting there for two days -- published on Friday, dated on Monday. Now I'm quite sure that Richard Morse may have just thought he was finding a way to publish his Monday blog post on Friday -- I can't say HuffPo is an "abuser" in post-dating posts -- but this is just one little incident of a posting behavior or tactic I've noticed a lot over the past weeks as I've worked to populate Shrook on a new computer. Personally I find it rather annoying.