William Reardon’s Blog

Blogs are great. With blogs I can follow the writings of people I find interesting.

RSS is great too. With RSS I can follow millions of different sites without having to visit everyone just to see if anything new posted. With RSS I can also do other things like subscribe to someone’s Flickr feed to see news photos as they take them, or to their delicious bookmarks feed to see links as they add them.

What’s annoying is when user’s willy-nilly mix them together. That is, I subscribe to your blog feed, which, crazy as it sounds, I expect to give me, you know, your blog. But instead of just your blog, I also get every single damn picture you ever take on your camera phone. I also get every damn link you come across on the Internet. Or whatever else damn thing people can think of shoehorn in their feed in an attempt to seem prolific or “in the loop.”

In Internet-land, this combination of feeds into one is called splicing.

In Bill-land, it’s called fucking annoying.

Stop it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of having feeds for photos. And for links. Heck, I even subscribe to a few linkblogs.

Go ahead, provide feeds for photos & links if you think it’ll be interesting. But don’t make that my only option. Even go ahead and have a ‘fat feed’ that spices together you blog with your links with your photos with the temperature in your refrigerator. Just don’t make that your only option.

Doing so violates not just one rule, but two. First, it violates Bill’s Third Rule:

Never annoy your users.

Second, it violates Bill’s Forth Rule (A.k.a. Bill’s Rule of Least Surprise):

It should be obvious what your feed contains.

If you have a feed associated with a blog, that feed should contain the contents of that blog and only that blog. You can have other feeds. But call out those feeds as different and note the differences.

Long ago, it used be just FeedBurner that would encourage this annoying characteristic. But given the recent increase, it looks like both MyWeb and del.icio.us let you do it now too. Ugh.

All of you stop it. You’re violating the Second Rule:

Don’t be annoying.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.