Why Do You Need to Produce Feeds

Considerations When Producing a Feed

Once you discover how easy it is to produce a web feed and how easy the plethora of feed readers out there makes it for your users to consume your feed, you may have some inner drive to produce feeds for everything. Don't.

First, as with any project, consider how useful the feed will be to outside users, what new information it will provide, and how it will be used. If this is a business site, consider how the feed will help achieve your corporate goals. Sure it would be cool to have a feed that ran the current weather in your office's city, but A) chances are you have windows (the look outside kind, not the operating system kind), B) a variety of sites already provide exactly this service, and C) is this something worth devoting resources toward?

Second, consider the load requirements of generating the data. Remember that feeds are usually consumed by software automatically, at preset intervals. Many preset to small increments such as half an hour. Users who may have visited a given page once per day are now downloading the feed up to 48 times per day! Multiply that by the number of potential users, and you have a lot of additional traffic, and, unless you play your caching cards right, a lot of load on the server. Some of this, however, is negated by the smaller document size overall. For example, visiting http://slashdot.org/ involves a total of 23 HTTP requests, and a total size (images and all) of 21,819 bytes, whereas visiting http://slashdot.org/index.rss involves only one HTTP request, and only 4,515 bytes — definitely a significant savings.

Finally, do consider the usefulness of this feed to your competitors. Placing all of your current pricing information or weekly production schedules in a feed may seem like a great boon internally (especially to upper management), but consider the repercussions if that URL becomes known to your competitors! Because feeds are generally consumed by software automatically, it can be more difficult to secure access. I strongly recommend against providing confidential data in a feed without first undergoing a strenuous security audit and seriously considering the alternatives.

Publicizing Your Feed

As with any web project, your work is worthless unless you publicize it to your target audience. This is becoming easier and easier with some recent developments in the browser world. Mozilla in particular has made this quite easy in recent releases. When the browser sees the appropriate alternate link code in a document header, it presents an RSS icon in the lower-right corner of the browser window to inform the user, who may then create a "Live Bookmark" to monitor the feed. For example:

However, publicizing your feed involves at least one more step. Create at least one page for your site that lists the URLs for the various feeds you will be providing, as well as what format the feeds will follow (RSS, Atom, and so on). You should also consider offering more detailed information about what type of content should be expected within the feed itself — what HTML tags should be expected, maximum length, and so on. This is important, because responsible, security-conscious users of your feed will need to filter the information they receive, and can make a much more intelligent decision about how to do that if you let them know what to expect.