Envisioned Prototype The Online Portfolio and Professional Blog of Daniel Yearwood

My First RSS Feed!

Shortly after I came aboard at Snap-on Equipment, I along with the assistance of my team put together our first company newsletter (you can see it here).  It was great, because a newsletter is a great way to reach out to customers and let them know about new products, how your product can help their business, and what new and exciting things are going on in your company's world. Anyways, when we first started, we printed and mailed all of our newsletters. The newsletters looked great, and a lot of people liked them. However, it was hard to maintain the list of people who wanted to receive them, and tedious to remove those who didn't. Most of all, it was very expensive.

Naturally, I also placed our newsletter on our web site. The first alternative to printed newsletters I thought of was to try to start up a e-mail subscription. However, the other reason I thought this was a bad idea is that with all the spam people get, people will probably not want to sign up for an e-mail newsletter either. Also, it would be time consuming and tedious to maintain the database of registered recipients, and a pain to have to remove people. So I came up with what I consider the best solution: RSS 2.0.

As Wikipedia states,

RSS (an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URI (often referred to informally as a "URL" (uniform resource locater), although technically the two terms are not exactly synonymous) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,^[4] the RSS icon ("") first gained widespread use between 2005 and 2006.^[5]

The RSS feed is a great tool for this type of requirement. It allows customers to subscribe and stay updated on the company's current events, and be dynamically updated everytime I update the RSS feed. Even better, it's totally up to the customer on whether or not they subscribe or not, and even after they subscribe, they can remove it from their reader at their will!

Anyways, I added this to the web site on March 31, 2009. This week, I added it to our home page and added another feed to our Updates section, so that when we introduce news or a new product, customers can stay updated.