RSS Awareness Day: How are SF zines doing?
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Uncategorized, Web Design
Today is RSS Awareness Day. I usually don’t put much stock in these arbitrary awareness days, but RSS has changed the way I think about information fundamentally, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about that today, with a focus on how zines have adopted the technology, or not.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In practice, RSS involves a feed and a feed reader. Think of these components as like a webpage, and a browser (except that feed readers can work in browsers, and feeds syndicate the content of websites, but let’s not go there just yet). The feed reader parses the content of RSS feeds and presents them in a format that you and I can read. The RSS feed is generally made up of a form of XML, and is a single file containing all the recent updates to a website, generally the blog stuff. RSS feeds are the underlying technology in podcasting as well.
In simple terms, RSS feeds allow you to aggregate content from a bunch of different websites, keeping track of new content, without having to visit the websites themselves. There is more that can and will be done with the tech, but right now, this is the primary use.
Why I Love RSS
I have a mental illness that manifests itself in an intense fear that somewhere, something is happening on the internet that is cool, and I am not reading about it. My RSS reader is my medication, and I take an hourly dose. If not more.
Prior to using feed readers, I had a blog roll, and I would manually click through the links, checking each website one after another. I’d get to the end of the list and start over again. Ostensibly, my feed reader (Google Reader being my drug of choice) saves me time by collecting new entries from all these sites, sorting them, and allowing me to treat them more like email than websites. Each post comes in as a separate item, and I mark them as read or unread, and can sort them into different folders for organizing.
Up until a few months ago, I was subscribed to nearly 300 feeds on subjects ranging from biology to web design. I realized that all this information was overwhelming me, so I stepped it down to half of that. Most of what I removed were science fiction related feeds. I realized, at a certain point, that not everyone in the field had something to say about the genre that I was interested in.
Despite the ability to become overwhelmed, I still love RSS because it does provide efficiency in something I would be doing anyway–trying to keep track of a million things. It brings me constant sources of new information, and on a good, day I learn a dozen new things that prove useful in the long run. Many of the links that I blog (and that blogging feature is currently not working and I do not know why. Paul Raven, could you shoot me an email with your delicious settings? Somehow, I’ve got mine wrong) come from my feeds.
Speculative Fiction and RSS
One of the last things I did before closing up shop at the Fortean Bureau was to move the site to a content management system and provide an RSS feed. I don’t know if I was the first to do this–probably not–but there’s still sporadic adoption especially among the ‘zines.
Online Zines I read with RSS Feeds
- Fantasy Magazine
- Clarkesworld
- Escape Pod (well, not ‘read’, but ‘listen’)
- PodCastle (same as above)
- Lone Star Stories (Somebody listened to me! Insanity!)
Magazines I read that DO NOT have RSS Feeds that I can find
- Strange Horizons
- Note: SH does have a feed for the reviews. (Thanks Niall!)
Lone Star Stories- Subterranean Press (has RSS feed, but not just for the fiction)
- Chizine
My point being, if you are an online magazine publisher in this day and age, you need to adopt RSS as a marketing tool if for no other reason. RSS reminds me to check these sites. The ones without, I am more likely to forget about, unless, ironically, someone else in my feeds mentions the new content. You don’t even have to syndicate the full text of the short stories for me. Just a title and author (please, please include author in your feed information. Fantasy doesn’t do this, and I think it’s problematic. It looks like the author of every story is “Sean”) is sufficient to function as a reminder. It’s like a newsletter notification, only less obnoxious (why, I am not sure. I guess because you only ever get RSS from what you set up for, so there’s no such thing as RSS spam).
If you have a blog, you have a feed
As to the rest of us, if you’re using any of the common blogging services, you’re almost certainly serving up a feed somewhere. Ask yourself if your design displays the RSS feed prominently enough that interested parties can subscribe. Those of us who use Firefox have it easy. Firefox automatically detects whether a site has a feed and displays an orange icon in the address bar of the browser, but only if the RSS feed is properly indicated in the header of the html document. Some sites have feeds, but fail to put that link in the header template, so we have to hunt the page for the link. You lose potential readers the longer they go without finding it. And yes, I know that my new design doesn’t have an RSS Link featured prominently. I’m terrible at taking my own advice, but I am going to offer a very detailed RSS sidebar in the future, allowing people to subscribe to particular types of information that I write about seperately. It’s coming soon.
RSS: It’s not just for posts anymore
RSS feeds have gained some interesting new tools and uses recently. Yahoo Pipes allows anyone to mash up various RSS feeds and create new types of content. Blog management systems like WordPress now offer RSS feeds for individual posts, so that you can follow the comment discussions. RSS use is growing. It could stand to be a bit easier, as mashable.com wrote recently, but it’s a technology that is going to stay around for the forseeable future. It really does save time. If you’re not already using a Reader, I highly suggest you consider one. And if you’re not providing an RSS feed of your content, you’re missing out on readers.
