> Approval is about technical accuracy, not value of content. I've > approved feeds for blogs that were awful (in my opinion), and marked > feeds for repair where the content was great (in my opinion) but the > feeds were broken.
Excellent point Stuart, thanks. > > Although one person said that a couple of the feeds needed fixing, it > > was only a font problem in 2 or 3 of the feeds. > > Probably not a "font problem"... The tendency to jam all sorts of formatting gunk sort of misses the point about how to best use RSS. It's all about preseting titles and descriptions that let the reader make decisions about whether it's worth following that link and reading more about it on the website. You don't need flashing formatting for this. What you need are well-written titles and descriptions that effectively engage your audience. Catch their attention and they'll come visit the website for more of the story. You can then track those landing URLs in your server logs and get a VERY accurate measure of just what drew the audience's attention. > > for some reason, RSS likes this quote: " and not this one: " > > ...that implies an XML encoding problem. Yep, it's not the validator or RSS, it's XML that's picky about it. There really aren't than many rules in XML but there are a few that cannot be ignored. Character encoding is one of them. The validator is pretty thorough in how it checks feeds. The good part is it's independent. It's not tied to any one particular service so it's free to be VERY rigorous in it's testing. Note that not everything it complains about is an error. There are some 'warnings' it makes (along with offering explanations) that are generally good to correct. > We're more than happy to approve technically-sound feeds, but if > you're looking to have broken feeds approved because you think the > content is good, you need to re-think what approval on Syndic8 is > really about. I agree. First and foremost it's about the feed being valid. Then it's abo ut being usable in a feed reader (as in, not laden with formatting gunk). I suppose foremost would be that it's not SPAM, but that's a given. That the content isn't something we dwell too closely upon. That it's not useful to "me" doesn't mean it's not valid or approvable. Lots of other folks might find the content quite useful. There are things like test feeds, setups from new sites than never got updated, junk sites just looking to pimp adsense links or game search engines, and the like that are things we reject. But beyond those obvious attempt to publish junk everything else is worth being validated and approved. When reviewing, if the feed is valid but the content is outside the realm of what you might consider "useful" just pass on it. Leave it for someone else to approve if you like. The act of 'approving' a feed doesn't have to mean you 'like' it. It just means it was valid and appeared to have content that could be used. But even I've come across feeds that were, shall we say, not exactly my cup of tea. I just passed over them and left them for someone else to mark approved. If only because I didn't want to have my account show up linked to approving it and giving the search engine stalkers something to fixate upon. I mean, who'd want to have some half-wit HR person run a google search and reject them from a job because a link to a strange blog came up? Thus sometimes it's simpler to just pass over a feed, even when it's totally valid otherwise. It's not a perfect science, but we try. -Bill Kearney Syndic8.com If you're getting "too much mail" then send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (this will tell it to stop sending you mail) To change your membership use THIS WEB PAGE: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (here you can set your mail to digest, no mail or LEAVE the list) To find more info about Syndicated XML newsfeeds visit http://www.syndic8.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
