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    <title>Elezea by Rian van der Merwe - RSS Feed</title>
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        <title>A guide to good RSS feed citizenship for blog publishers</title>
        <link>https://elezea.com/2012/07/rss-feedburner-clean-urls/</link>
        <pubDate>Sat, 07 Jul 2012 05:09:20 +0000</pubDate>
        <dc:creator>Rian van der Merwe</dc:creator>
        <guid isPermaLink="false">https://elezea.com/?p=1695</guid>
        <description>
          <![CDATA[A few recommended guidelines for your blog's RSS feed, and how to provide clean URLs in your feed.]]>
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          <![CDATA[<p>I do most of my online reading <a href="https://elezea.com/2011/09/in-defense-of-rss/">through RSS</a>, and <a href="http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage">I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m alone</a>. For the most part this is a good reading experience, but there are a few things publishers can do to make it even better. So if you publish a blog, here are three proposed guidelines for RSS feeds:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Have an RSS feed and make it easy to subscribe</strong>. Contrary to popular belief, Twitter did not kill RSS. It&#8217;s alive and well. So please don&#8217;t bury or hide the feed &mdash; it should be easy to find the link and subscribe. Also, do some work on your feed &#8211; use a service like <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/">Feedburner</a> to customize it (and give you analytics on your subscribers).</li>
<li><strong>Unless it&#8217;s central to your revenue model, don&#8217;t provide article excerpts only</strong>. I understand that there are subscription sites that require payment to get access to full RSS feeds &mdash; that&#8217;s a conscious business decision, so if it works, great! But for the rest of us, RSS excerpts are a bad idea. It places the burden on anyone following your shared items to click through to see the article, and that slows people down. As a general rule (with the above stated exception), please provide a full feed &#8211; you&#8217;ll grow your audience and eventually get those click-throughs because of it.</li>
<li><strong>Remove the metadata from your feed URLs</strong>. If I <em>do</em> click through to an article to comment, share it on Twitter, etc., a URL like this looks bad and makes sharing harder to track: http://uxmag.com/design/debating-the-fundamentals?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UXM<br />+%28UX+Magazine%29.
<p>The stuff after the &#8220;?&#8221; is added by Feedburner so you can get detailed analytics on item link clicks. But unless you <em>really</em> want to see where your RSS feed clicks come from you don&#8217;t need this level of detail. All you need to know is the number of Item Views in your feed &mdash; the rest of your analytics can come from Google Analytics. It&#8217;s very easy to turn this tracking off to remove the metadata and make your URLs more friendly. In Feedburner, go to &#8220;Configure Stats&#8221; and uncheck the &#8220;Item link clicks&#8221; box. Here&#8217;s a screen shot:</li>
</ol>
<p><img decoding="async" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="feedburner-urls" src="https://cdn.elezea.com/images/feedburner-urls.jpg" border="0" alt="feedburner URLs" /></p>
<p>In Luke Wroblewski&#8217;s new project <a href="http://futurefriend.ly/">Future Friendly</a>, they discuss their <a href="http://futurefriend.ly/thinking.html">thinking</a> around universal content:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well-structured content is now an essential part of art direction. Consider how it can flow into a variety of containers by being mindful of their constraints and capabilities. Be bold and explore new possibilities but know the future is likely to head in many directions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you publish content on the web it&#8217;s <em>not</em> future friendly to ignore and/or limit its use in RSS, which is one of the most important containers we have at our disposal.</p>
          <br>
          <br>
          <hr>
          Thanks for still believing in RSS! Get in touch <a href="https://elezea.com/contact">here</a> if you'd like.]]>
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