RSS might be one of those things you’ve been hearing about floating around the internet nowadays. It’s a truncated listing of all the recent entries in a blog or news site, meant to be read by an external RSS reader of some sort every few minutes, and provides a summary of the recent post as well as links to the full content and anything else relevant. With so much content out there, an RSS reader can take in hundreds of feeds and save its user the tediousness of visiting each one in turn.
And as with all things Internet, there’s no standard and most people do a poor job.
Let’s start with what RSS is supposed to do: to aggregate feeds and present quick-and-dirty blurbs about a new blog entry or news article. It’s there so the user doesn’t have to refresh and check the site manually, so the content must carefully balance holding the user’s interest and providing too much content.
Due to recent problems with my host and their server’s paranoia of PHP picture manipulation code, I’ll refrain from posting pictures until they fix it or I get a new host. I guess I’m going to have to make an impact with mundane, trivial text.Anyway, a friend recently recommended a blog on Web 2.0 developments (you know, all that talk about online social networking, the power of the people and tagging and so forth…), TechCrunch. It helpfully lists a lot of startups () and the services they offer, the vast majority of which are free and have refined interfaces (AJAX enabled, think Google Maps).
Ah, a reason for this here site’s existence and evolution. According to a CNN article about a week back, web surfers judge a site’s aesthetic content in a blink of an eye, just quick enough for them to scroll to yawn or hit the back button. It’s even tougher than that 3-seconds-to-get-your-attention rule they use for television.
True, if you have no content, all you’ve done is compel a user to take long enough to sip his coffee and then close the browser in disgust. But apparently, someone who stumbles upon a site will most likely only hesitate for a split second, sans coffee, to leave it.
A sad parallel to the canonical dateless wonder, Mr. “I’ve got all the personality in the world but I fell out of the ugly tree hitting every branch on the way down” Nice Guy.
Just finished reading a book on site design – the one I exchanged DHTML and CSS Advanced for. Thankfully, this tome was much closer to what I wanted when I went out (on a whim, really) to conduct some book-learnin’.
Sites usually have two parts: the backend work (keeping, processing, and managing all that content) and the frontend design (all those pretty pictures, navigation, colors and text). Traditionally, software engineers dealt with the former and graphic designers dealt with the latter, with very little overlap in expertise.
Originally, I wanted to write a quick blurb about how the coming of the Internet doesn’t negate the importance of reference and learning textbooks. But then today, I had to promptly return a copy of DHTML and CSS Advanced as it merely told me 90% of what I learned via online tutorials and experimentation, and I realized that the subject matter isn’t that clear cut after all.
If you’ve never met a programmer, you might imagine that, being on the forefight of technology, he (forgive me, I only use “he” because it describes 90% of the programming population) would use a combination of online manuals/tutorials, search engines, and maybe a bit of knowledge sharing among peers to get his work done. All the code driving this site – from the backend database management to the interface and the glue that holds them together – I learned from a few select sites and the magic powers of Google. Creators and owners of these technologies have put up extensive manuals on their work for free, and anybody with a bit of free time and an inquisitive mind can be self-educated with much less effort than it used to take (e.g. via sneaking into lectures in universities you weren’t enrolled in).