I recently took over the maintenance of the Foothills Library Association Jobline. I said I wouldn’t do it unless I could convert it from a static HTML page to an RSSified page, and the Executive said "great", so I did. I felt it was important to do this for a couple of reasons; 1) it used to only be updated once per week, and now it’s updated daily through Blogger – days count in the job hunt! And 2) I thought that asking job-hunters to remember to come visit our page once per week wasn’t a good use of their time, so I wanted to provide a way to have content delivered to them automatically. Obviously RSS takes care of that, but I also had a hunch that most folks weren’t heavy users of RSS aggregators, so I wanted to make sure there was an RSS-Email option. A recent study seems to validate this decision:
"However, the majority of respondents to the survey said they were less familiar with RSS feeds. Among the other respondents, 23 per cent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 per cent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it."
In a couple of earlier posts I explored (mostly with help from you!) various options for delivering RSS feeds via email. You might want to make sure your readers have an option like this as well!
Comments
One response to “One in 10 visitors to blog sites uses RSS”
Paul, I’m sure that I speak for many when I say “thank you! thank you! thank you!” for rss-ifying the Jobline! It’s a great resource, but has always been a big ole’ pain to check (not that, um, I need to check job listings anymore : )