Cincinnati.com now has RSS feeds. There is an RSS button on each story within the Cincinnati.com and Cincinnati Enquirier sites. Its a nice first start, but there is some flaws in their implmentation. They are:
1.) Lack of a RSS link on the home and category pages of the site. For example, the dining feed should be linked directly from the Dining Section of the site.
2.) Lack of RSS Auto-Discovery Tags. This would make using smart RSS tools that will find the feeds for you. The tool I use, LiveLines , eases subscribing to a feed in Bloglines.
3.) The feeds should be named better. I'll use the dining feed as example again. Its url is http://news.enquirer.com/feeds/rss06.xml Would it have killed them to name the feed dining.xml rather than rss06.xml? I know the metadata in the feed will self-identify it as the Cincinnati.com Dining feed, but giving good names to URLs is a simple way of increasing usability.
4.) Links to RSS feeds not on the Cincy Post, WCPO and Cin Weekly story pages. Since these sites are all linked together and share content with Cincinnati.com, they should all get the RSS treatment.
I will end on a postive. It is nice to see that Cincinnati.com has given people abrief into to RSS, links to aggregators and easy to use My Yahoo! Subscription buttons. That's a nice way to ease people into the great world of RSS.
(via Nick Spencer)
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