A lot of people have been asking for us to implement RSS feeds for various stuff. The staff and I are doing a round table this afternoon working on a few IT issues, and RSS feeds will be discussed. I'd like to solicit a little input from you guys out there on a few things regarding RSS feeds.Most people that ask us for RSS want it linked to store updates so they can subscribe to a daily new arrivals feed, so that's were we're focusing our attention.
The technical back end for an RSS feed quite simple, and we already have our feed application and server space in place for the XML files and we have a few beta test feeds setup generated from our regular HTML updates. What gets s little complicated is the presentation and formatting of the data, especially considering how many applications there are for reading them and the different ways each application handles the XML coding. I think it would help us quite a bit if you RSS users out there could give us some input on two things:
1) What is your preferred reader program?
2) How do you use the feeds, or how do you typically setup your reader to format the feed data?
For a couple of examples, it could be as simple as setting up an article headline highlighting the section update and linking back to the master updates page section, or we could setup a slightly more complex feed that contains one linked new arrival item per headline, with the item linking back to the order page. That feed would allow our software to setup one feed item per new arrival. This would be most compatible with people who format as headline readers, but would not work well for our typical large posts as most people setup their readers to only see the last 5 or 10 feed items so generating 60 or 70 feed items in one day would not be practical, though that method would allow absolutely real time updates to happen as new items are scanned in through out the day, which would be kinda neat. There will be at least one or two days a week when we can have anywhere from 15-60 new items on average in a single day. We could breakup to product categories into separate feeds (DVD / Manga / Figures / etc) but that would require people interested in several different lines to subscribe to multiple feeds, and make handling the update data more complex on our end by having to generate multiple XML files each day.
We could also setup the feed data by category and include a headline linking back to the relevant store updates page section followed by bulleted lists that break down each item with a link to that item's order page. This is the method I'm favoring, and you can see above how one of our Beta files looks in Google Reader. This method would require the user to setup the feed to display article data (if they use the reader gadget in Firefox for example), and the linked data would not appear on reader applications set to show the headline only.
So there are a lot of ways we could approach it. Any input would be most appreciated. :-)
