I'm still not entirely thrilled with the tone my last few posts about
RSS and the Presbyterian Church (USA). I think the last one was pretty
accurate, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. I hope to contrast those posts with some suggestions. Almost each one has the purpose of making it easier for people to get their hands on information about Christ, our denomination and their work in the world.
Changing the RSS feeds to full-text feeds would increase their usefulness the most. Full text feeds include the title of the page or post along with the whole body. When reading my feeds, I almost never leave Google Reader. I currently have 97 feeds and the information must be compelling to get me to leave. Placing all of the information in the feed makes it that much easier for me to at least skim the article and hear the message. Bloggers who earn their income from ads around their posts have even learned full-text feeds increase the number of readers (via Robert Scoble) just by sticking an ad or two in each post. They present the full argument. The biggest argument against full-text feeds is people stealing content, but I can't see how this would apply to the PCUSA. Our goal should be to enable as many people as possible to access this information. Why make people get it from the website? If full-text feeds are not possible, at least include an introductory or summary paragraphs to make it a partial-text feed.
The feeds can be displayed much more prominently on the PCUSA homepage. I still don't see them and the only way I could find them was through searching for RSS. Remove them from the graphics library, link to them from the home page. There can also be links in the page header to notify modern browsers of the feeds for the page and or site and display a feed icon(
) to the visitor where the visitor is used to seeing it. contact me or view the source of this page for the details of how to do this.
Encourage web developers to work with the raw feed instead of having to use this pre-formatted code snippet. The box looks nice on the PCUSA site, is easy for novices to integrate into their sites and probably looks alright for a handful of more professional sites, but it prevents web developers from tapping into the full power of RSS. RSS really is just a specially formatted data document placed on the web. The real power is its flexibility. Knowledgeable web developers can do almost anything with the information and can use it to spread a message in ways we haven't imagined. Free these people to use their gifts to empower the church. It would also be good to see the required sign-up and endorsement dropped along with the pre-formatted code snippet. Either one of these by itself would have most web developers walking away from an opportunity. The community strongly values freedom to information and resists endorsing products and companies they don't strongly believe in, let alone don't know anything about.
Once again, I'd like to reiterate my goal of offering suggestions to improve how we use the web to serve Christ better. I don't intend to pick on the PCUSA. They just happen to be the most recent example I've found of a website that has awesome resources that I believe could be offered to the web more effectively.
What have I left out? Are these bad ideas? Am I wrong? I don't think so, but let me know if you do.