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Feed Your Audience With RSS Feeds
"Times" is an RSS reader for Mac by Acrylic Software
RSS feeds haven’t actively gained mainstream adoption, but have provided a great service to the people that don’t want to have the potential of missing something that they wanted to see. Essentially, an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a file on a Web site that only contains the content, and separates each update into an individual post with a timestamp of when the update was made. The website design completely removed from the content if the user is really only interested in the content. People can then subscribe to that one URL using an RSS reader (I will go into more detail about this below) and they will be notified when there’s been an update made to your site and how many updates that have yet to read.
If a user stumbles across an RSS feed, it might be something that they haven’t used before and don’t really understand the benefits of subscribing to it. There’s a few things that are making this adoption process easier for the user. Most modern web browsers are including RSS readers so that the content is displayed the way a user can understand when you visit an RSS feed. For the publishers out there, you might look into using a service like Feedburner to enhance your feed. The services that Feedburner include a user-friendly interface, analytics, sharing functionality, promoting your feed to news hubs, email subscriptions, and more. You can visit our feed that’s been sent through feedburner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/HRB and check out what would show up without feedburner here. The next post I’ll write will address the concerns you may have of possible lost traffic to your website resulting in lower ad revenue or leads, because people are using RSS feeds to bypass directly visiting your site.
The beauty of the RSS feed isn’t the fact that it’s once place to go for all of your content, but rather the nearly endless options of how you want to go about reading it. The RSS readers out there allow you to put all of your RSS feeds in one place. At that point you can choose how you want to be notified when there’s a new post on any of the feeds you’re subscribed to so you never need to visit a website just to find out that they haven’t updated anything on it. The range of RSS readers offer a variety of ways to interact with your feeds. Google Reader is a powerful feed reader that is simple to use, has unique community features with other people who use it, and keeps track of your reading patterns to show you the stuff you’re more interested first based on your past behaviors. There’s also applications for both Mac and Windows that you might choose to use also. There’s one that caught my eye, called Times (Mac only), that styled your feeds as if you were reading a newspaper, and when you click on the headline it shows the full article either as a new page in the “newspaper” or as the actual site where the article is located. This might be an interesting way to go if people start using tablet computers (such as the iPad) where this is provides a newspaper-like experience that shows you what you want to read and nothing that you don’t while also including high-resolution photos and videos.
RSS is a very basic and universal capability that sites can take advantage of. In fact, podcasts became popular once people started utilizing RSS feeds to take care of distributing the new episodes to the subscribers as soon as it’s available. If you’ve never tried using RSS feeds to go about reading the blogs or news sites that you frequent, I recommend that you first find an RSS reader that appeals to you (considering that’s what you’re going to be using to read everything), add the feeds of a few websites, and give it a try for a short while. You might find it’s not for you, but you might also find it a great time-saver or a nicer way to go about staying up-to-date with the sites you frequent.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: Software Standards
The key element in building the new Web standard is making it so that every computer and every mobile device sold will be capable of displaying the same content without making any compromises in quality (while keeping the ability to customize / optimize the interface for specific devices). The posts I’ve made over the past few weeks have been covering website design technologies that will be able to do just that.
If you look at the design of the iPhone (and many devices since it’s release), it really focuses on taking your attention away from the actual device in an effort to draw your attention to what’s actually happening on the screen. There are so many choices when purchasing a device that there’s no way to really go wrong in terms of the hardware’s capabilities. The number one aspect that really makes a device great is the software that’s available, and how you actually use it. The iTunes App Store really locks people into purchasing the new iPhone when buying a new phone, because you can’t use any of the apps you’ve purchased through the App Store on any other phone. If they choose to buy a new phone, then they’re forced to re-purchase similar apps to ones they already had.
AT&T just announced that they have a new phone that’s using Android (Google’s Phone OS) that will have a locked down App Store that they have full control over. Mobile devices are currently dividing and controlling users’ software experiences. Meanwhile, personal computers have 3 choices for software compatibility (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and those are becoming more cross-compatible every day. There’s software that you can run that simply takes an application written for one of the other operating systems and makes it so that it runs on your computer as if it were made to do that from the start. There’s this trend in the emerging technology where the manufacturers and carriers are trying to make as much money as possible as people jump into a category of technology they haven’t dealt with before so they’re not sure what to expect in terms of pricing and experience. Once people realize that this simply isn’t what they want, the market will have to change to a new model, and that might be the personal computer’s model of a few major competitors with separate purposes, the unified standard of Web site technologies, or something we have yet to see.
The one choice that I currently see being the best option is to use web standards. The Internet isn’t new so why haven’t we seen any of the cool stuff I’ve talked about yet? One of the primary issues with web development in the past is that the Web sites out there have had to build sites for web browsers that just don’t have the same capabilities as the browsers today so it’s limited by the least capable, but most common, browsers being used. Hardware manufacturers are constantly making and improving upon these really great devices, and the software needs to be able to adapt and make the best use of the new devices. Modern web browsers have also changed the way that they update themselves so that making sure users have the latest version will be more obvious if not automatic. This is good news.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: A New-level of Interaction
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At the heart of the new development process while working on websites is the emphasis on improving how we interact with the websites we visit, and making them more intuitive to use for those that haven’t learned how to use a computer yet. Ideally, the websites will be intuitive enough that people will no longer need to use trial and error or follow tutorials before they understand how to use the site. A key element to that is providing real-time feedback without the need to take the user to a new page or make them refresh.
Now that the more basic elements of website design are well established, people are free to focus on making sure that the site is user-friendly and a joy to use. One way to accomplish this is to make the site more lively with subtle animations that give the user hints that they can interact with it. Users can hopefully appreciate the time that is saved whenever an action is made or feedback is given without the need to take them to another page. Instead, JavaScript is used to make the update right on the page they’re already on. It can show it instantly if it’s a small amount of information, but if that’s too jarring the developer might add in a little animation.
JavaScript has influenced a large part of the development of HTML5, and is also available to a larger percentage of the users on the internet than years prior. That in consideration, interactions in the way that provides real-time, easy to understand, and a level of consistency will most likely use your web browser’s built-in JavaScript capabilities rather than using an external plugin.
In my last post about animation, I mentioned how Flash still has it’s place in web design but simple interactions are the first thing to be changed from being programed in Flash to JavaScript. This really furthers the point.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a full-service advertising agency and Internet marketing firm that focuses on branding, developing and executing marketing roadmaps, and growing companies.
Building a New Web: Seamless Animation
For years now, there has been only one way to make things animated on the web. Flash quickly became the dominant technology for animation due to the complete lack of competition. It also provided a great vector graphics platform that’s capable of providing graphics with a very small file-size. There is another technology for animation, but it isn’t a fully-capable Flash replacement. JavaScript provides support for very simple positioning, resizing, and color animations, but doesn’t have the ability to do anything more advanced than that. Considering that JavaScript wasn’t built with the intent of using it for animation, things as simple as rotating an object simply aren’t possible so it isn’t a viable solution for most applications. What it manages to do is provide a nice middle ground between a static page and exporting and embedding a flash animation.
The latest development is an iteration of an existing website design technology called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS has been used for years as the primary technology for styling websites. When you view sites without CSS enabled they all look the same; white background, blue links, the same serif fonts, nothing positioned in the correct place, etc. Essentially, CSS keeps most websites from looking like they could have been made in Microsoft Word. This latest version of CSS (using HTML 5) is drawing the attention of web developers because it will provide full support for advanced animation.
Not only will CSS provide support for the basic animations that were availble through JavaScript, but it will also provide the capabilities of rotation, skewing, 3D, and more. There will also be a performance boost compared to other animation technologies, because CSS has been fully optimized for the single purpose of rendering graphics on a website. It will also be able to utilize the powerful graphics cards that computers ship with today, and that’s something that has yet to be taken advantage of on the websites that most of us visit.
It is important to compare Flash and CSS because it’s worth understanding the advantages and disadvantages of choosing one over the other. There’s no denying that Flash has a well-established install base and provides vecor graphics capabilities that are still some of the best out there, but for the most part CSS is giving Flash a run for it’s money in terms of animation. I’m not proclaiming Flash to be dead, but I definitely hope that this level of competition will push Adobe towards more innovative thinking than they’ve had in the last few years.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: Geolocation
In my past articles, I’ve mentioned how always-connected portable devices are changing the technological landscape. No area is being more influenced by this than geolocation. This concept was first introduced in GPS devices that could do no more than show where you currently are and hopefully help guide the way to where you’d like to go. The technology behind it is mostly unchanged, but now that the number of people with location-enabled devices is on the rise there are companies and communities exploring new uses for geolocation.
The iPhone has seen a surge of apps that allow you to “check-in” at any particular location. You can then decide to send out a message to your friends so they can come join you. The apps also keep track of each time you check into a location so they can integrate a game component into their service. They award “badges” to users that complete a certain objective such as, “Gym Rat” where you visit the gym over 10 times in 30 days. They also provide ranks for the top visitors of a certain location, and the highest attending visitor is commonly known as the “Mayor” of that location. These new services are a great idea considering they encourage meeting with friends, going out more frequently, and help promote / advertise your favorite businesses. The most popular services out there are Foursquare, Yelp, and Gowalla. Check them out, because they might provide an app for your phone even if it’s not an iPhone. Yelp is the latest to provide check-ins so it’s a little limited at the moment, but also provides the user-reviews that made the site so popular. These services are still very early on, and they’re providing a good amount of competition for each other.
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Website designers are now able to integrate geolocation into websites as soon as the HTML5 standard gains a larger install base. This seems to be yet another feature that gained popularity through the iPhone’s App Store and is now being included as a capability of the new web. Developers will rejoice as they won’t have to make and maintain a separate app for every device out there, and instead built it into a website that every device can use.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
