If you a feed reader - need you opinion...

[Sonya]

Hello,

I need to create RSS Feed for one project. The technical part is clear, but I myself do not read any feeds and therefore I need your opinion regarding, hmmm, usability. I have 3 questions for those reading RSS Feeds a lot.

1. Many feeds or one? What would you prefer?

There are 3 different sections on the page:
Articles (normal Content)
News (News Module)
and Blog (BMS)

There are 2 possibilities:
a. I can create one feed for each section to allow "separated feeding" for each section.
b. I can put all new items in one channel together prefixing each title with "Article:", "News:" or "Blog:".

There are approximately 1-2 new items a day from all sections together. What would be your choice?

2. How many characters in description of item is optimal for you?
What summary length would you prefer?

3. Are thumbnails important for feeds or is it childish stuff ?

I would appreciate every answer: short or detailed. Thank you!

[tyman00]

Sonya - I don't read feeds that much either, but here is my input.

1. Both ideas are good. You should probably evaluate if your viewers/readers tend to go to all 3 sections when visiting or if they only go to one or two of them. I would be led to believe that they read all 3 so combining them isn't a bad idea. You may want to find a way to indicate which item it is. I.E ---   ARTICLE: Article Name    BLOG: Blog Name   NEWS: News Item

Since blogs and news are sometimes the same thing you could combine the two and have a separate feed for your Articles. I would believe it to be less related to the other two.

2. I wouldn't limit it to a number of characters. I would limit to a descriptive paragraph. For example the "Summary" box in news would be great for a feed so long as you keep it to a paragraph or a few small paragraphs.

3. This is my personal opinion. I believe humans to be easily drawn in by visuals. So I say yes to thumbnails. You definitely want to use your logo for the channel with the syntax (http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss_channel.asp). It is up to you if you want to use images for each of your feed items. If you can find related icons for each item I'd use it. It wouldn't hurt any. With the right smarty syntax you could even use an icon to differentiate the different items between articles, blogs and news (like I discussed in #1).

These are just my opinions. My news RSS feed for my personal site is pretty basic and have had good luck with my Album/Photo feed. I have also had good luck with RSS for product feeds for commercial sites.

[uniqu3]

I do read feeds on a regular basis, but i think that every user has another opinion on these points so it is hard to please everyone.
I agree to tyman00 on point 1 and 2 but for the point 3 i prefer no images whatsoever
Feed should have a short descriptive text that atracts your use to come and visit your site again.
The more info you provide in RSS, less chance is to get your RSS Reader back to your site, at least thats my experience, when reading a feed from some sites that provide images and full text i dont even know anymore how the site looks like since i get all the information in my reader.

[Sonya]

Thank you, tyman00!

With the right smarty syntax you could even use an icon to differentiate the different items between articles, blogs and news.

Best idea! I have added different images to each section because I combine all the feeds in one. It makes it easy to understand what items belongs to what part.

[Sonya]

I do read feeds on a regular basis, but i think that every user has another opinion on these points so it is hard to please everyone.
I agree to tyman00 on point 1 and 2 but for the point 3 i prefer no images whatsoever
Feed should have a short descriptive text that atracts your use to come and visit your site again.
The more info you provide in RSS, less chance is to get your RSS Reader back to your site, at least thats my experience, when reading a feed from some sites that provide images and full text i dont even know anymore how the site looks like since i get all the information in my reader.

Thank you, uniqu3! In my feed I do not provide full text, since the articles are too long. The image is added to each section to separate them optically from each other, like thumbnails. And I use thumbnails as well for Album feed since the images in the album are the most important on this kind of feed item.