RSS Feed Considerations
My biggest question right now has been whether or not to add feeds to hockeyfights.com.
I set up the first feeds over a year ago, but never released them. At the time I was trying to decide between formats. RSS/Atom, and if RSS, which version? I was planning on putting out static versions of multiple feeds in multiple formats. After observing for a year and seeing that most use RSS 2.0 - and that seemingly all readers support it, I’ve decided I can start with just that and probably run into no problems.
There are three major RSS feeds I’d be posting: articles (which should see an increase in frequency), news (which can be slow or very active depending on the day), and a forums feed for new hockey threads (should be some pretty good activity there as well).
My issues with these all revolve around traffic. hockeyfights.com receives a good amount of traffic and RSS traffic concerns are becoming more and more well known. There are too many readers out there that all schedule to ping at the same time and some people configure their own to ping non-stop. I have little desire to waste tons of bandwidth and server resources to test out RSS services (something which I do not want to take away once I add, unless the technology progresses to something different).
My issues are these:
- Should I only produce static files? My assumption is yes. No reason to have dynamic feeds and waste the resources for it.
- Should I have “smart urls” for the feeds? In other words - should I do what I do now with the rest of the main site in having the urls be extensionless? The benefit of it is being able to change site structure and feed extension without changing the url. Example: USA Today uses a flat xml file (or at least appears to be, as you can always change the extension to use a scripting language): http://www.usatoday.com/repurposing/NHLRss.xml ESPN uses a “smart” url: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nhl/news The problem with having a smart url is that my server needs to process it. While it’s super fast and doesn’t consume many resources now - that can change if I start getting pinged by tons of people.
- Do I have the type of audience that will actually use these feeds? The largest demographic for the site is the coveted tv audience - males 18-35; stereotypically you’d think they’d be up on technology, but I’d say the crowd is pretty mixed in terms of tech-savviness.
- Do I circumvent this problem by using a service such as FeedBurner? I’m always hesitant to use outside services. Besides the possible non-professional appearance depending on how you view using domain names other than your own on your site (I’m never a fan of it for anything outside of a personal site); things like up-time are never guaranteed and I have no idea about the direction of the service. Will it remain free? If not, will there be ads in my feed or will I have the option to pay and remove them? And if that cost is more than the bandwidth I’d use hosting it on my own machine, could I move it back and have the FeedBurner url pointed to my site correctly?
Other considerations of mine:
- Currently I plan on having “teaser feeds” - that is not putting the full text into the feed. The idea of these feeds is to have people come to the site when interested. Along with that, I should point out I do not plan on having any ads in a feed such as that.
- I’m considering having the forums feed be members-only.
- If I could swing it, and make sure login security is tight, I’d like to have full-text feeds for premium members.
- Having an XML feed for team and player fighting major leaders along with a feed for the last few fights. If a site is interested, I could always design a premium (read: cost) feed for them. This would be useful to a bunch of sites out there, although I wonder how well some would be able to translate the XML and how much I would have to do to support it.
In the end it’s just trying to figure out how many subscribers and visitors I would get from the feeds compared to the cost of the feeds (and compare that to the cost of a “normal” visitor).
I’ll update with whatever decisions I come to, and if you’ve had any experiences where you’ve had to make similar decisions I’d love to hear them.
Comments:
Hey there ... I work over at FeedBurner, so I thought I just add a couple of comments.
Second, everything that’s free now will remain free, and we never do anything to your feed without your consent. We’re planning on (real soon) offering some premium paid statistics packages, but all the stats that you get now will remain free. The publisher is king with FeedBurner.The one other nice thing with FeedBurner is that you can maintain a single source feed and “burn” separate version. So, if you want to create a teaser feed, you can just use the “Summary Burner” service. If you want to toss links to Amazon sports items in a full-length feed, use the “Amazon Burner” service.
I think you’ll really like the stats, too.
Anyway, that’s enough—feel free to email me or hop over to the support forums if you have any other questions. And good luck!
Eric
Posted by Eric on Dec 13, 2004 at 11:12 PM
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