Why you need to KISS RSS.

No, I am not suggesting you get romantic with your RSS feeds. I am suggesting why you need to keep your RSS feeds simple, and how it pays off.

RSS and the many standards behind it (RDF, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, etc.) continue to evolve and add additional flexibilities and some complexities. These flexibilities may be good for a few situations, but they can come at a price.

Many RSS readers continue to struggle to develop tools that will accommodate the many and often miss-used options of the different RSS standards. The danger is the efforts you put into making a clean, fancy, feature-rich feed just might cause your feed to end up poorly rendered or not rendered at all.

Yes, RSS validators go a long way to help you generate compliant feeds, but we continue to see poorly formatted outputs.

By keeping your RSS feeds simple, clear and concise not only will you make the content more appealing to potential readers, but you also increase the probability that your feed will be rendered in the manner you intended.

After all, you only have one chance and a brief glimpse to attract a reader.

About the author:
Mark Savoca is the owner of Feedage.com. Feedage is a free, fully categorized RSS directory.

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