January 31, 2005

Comments

Now this is awesome. One problem is that there seems to be a defined width space for the RSS title image, so if it's too wide it's overlapped by the page title text (example here).

Other than that small quirk, a very clean and inviting redesign of the browser-friendly feed.

Hi

This looks Good, and makes a lot of sense. My reservation is that, given that bloglines recommends only setting redirect to temporary, I would rather everyone subscribed to my redirected feed url, rather than the feedburner address itself. Does that make sense?

Many thanks for the wonderful service. I hope this isn't taken as a complaint - it's very much not.

Cheers - Steve

Great suggestion, Steve. We should give you a place to enter your "front door" URL in the Browser-Friendly customizer, and then use that in styling the page.

We'll get to this as soon as we can. Thanks again!

Very nice work, guys. The certainly simplifies feed subscription for those new to RSS.

BTW, I agree wih Steve that the styled page should (at least optionally) link to the redirected feed rather than the FeedBurner one.

Very nice, I love seeing well researched design decisions. I was using with the plain version because of the previous design, but I've now switched all my feeds to the new layout. Thanks.

Looks much better - my only issue is that the actual RSS content is nearly "below the fold" with all the "how to's" and that the styles place more emphasis on "what is a feed" and "how to describe" than the feed headlines, which are much smaller.

Could you make the styles editable, or give publishers an option in their feed options as to whether or not to include this content?

we've considered offering an option for bfriendly that permits a user-supplied stylesheet to be applied to a fairly generic HTML layout in order to allow extensive branding/customization to take place. these comments (and others in our Forums) suggest that this might have some merit.

we also value the feedback on the headline sizing/styling. we purposely de-emphasized the actual feed content in order to reinforce the fact that this page shouldn't be the place to consume a feed -- but rather a stepping-off point to using the feed in your preferred reader. expect some revisions in the near future as feedback continues to roll in.

(finally, i agree the temporary redirect URL option is a great suggestion and an update we should incorporate.)

Great work guys. Just a few comments.

The feed:// URI link doesn't have an explanation for 'what is this' nor does it list a number of aggregators that support it such as RSS Bandit.

I can help with providing both the text and a list of aggregators that support the feed URI scheme if you want.

I'm using three different browsers on the Mac (Safari, Netscape and IE). None of them show http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2 properly - I'm getting angle brackets!

Bloggers are mostly using the latest browsers and newsreaders - but your changes are designed to help people who are unfamiliar with RSS, and they are more likely to be using older/unsupported browsers.

Is it possible to detect unsupported browsers and produce a plaintext alternative or something?

Re: Devaluing the content, I have to strongly disagree - that's *my* content that *you* have elected to devalue. How my users choose to access it is their choice, not yours. The value of feedburner as a service to content providers is the content publication capabilities, not education. If you want to add educational links, there is an awful lot of white space in the margins - why not use the right habnd margin to display static content unrelated to the feed?

Re: Temporary redirects, the problem with this is that search engines (which I want to index my RSS feed) take a very dim view of temporary redirects - an emerging trend is not to index pages that are temporarily redirected (and in fact to drop them from indices). Only permanent redirects will be spidered. FWIW I don't want feedburner to issue redirects (if I understand the earlier post correctly). OTOH I seem to be in the minority here :-(

Steve and Nick, thanks for the feedback. We've now added a field to the Browser-Friendly service where you can enter your redirected URL. See http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=1096 for more info.

Phil,

You can also try the "old school" style in Browser-Friendly ... just select the other radio button. You might like that style better.

Also, WE don't do any feed redirects. Instead, if people want to retain control of their feed URL, we recommend that they use an HTTP temp redirect to front for their FeedBurner URL. So if you're not doing that, no worries.

Hi Guys

I'm very impressed that a comment has turned so easily into a reality - thanks, what a wonderful thing.

Cheers - STeve

Thanks for making that change, Eric - great customer support :)

OK, so I am now clear on the redirect issue (I redirect all my old feeds to feedburner, works for me).

Since you added the redirect option, how about adding a "turn off the eductional materials" options for me :-)

Please.

Phil

phil,

thanks for the followup -- i understand where you're coming from and think that it's possible that we could address preferences like yours (my content front-and-center, "how-to" and other feedburner meta-information sidelined), as well as others' preference for the new design as-is by offering a couple of style variants _plus_ a new version that permits a user-supplied style sheet. i can't make this happen instantly (like eric did with the redirection field) but i think it's something we should take seriously. (in the meantime, i hope eric's suggestion of the 'old school' style might fit the bill.)

i'm glad for all the feedback on this update -- it's helpful hear about what's working (and what could use revision) from a cross-section of interested users.

Matt:

Thanks -- Don't get me wrong, I *like* the presentation changes in the new format. I am using it now as it's so much better than the alternatives. I'd just like to make it perfect :-)

Thanks for listening -- and since it's not clear from my comments, for the record you all run a great service here. FWIW I recommend you to everyone I know running an RSS feed.

Phil

As I noted in the comment forum (see "New look for XML page?" in the main forum), this decision will create a problem in some environments as the feed -- which seems to come directly from the blog owner -- promotes various commercial services including Yahoo and MSN.

This will be a serious problem for some non-profit users, including lots in the education sector, which are not allowed to advertise commercial enterprises.

Please, can there be a way to opt out of this?

If you are uncomfortable with the subscribe links (they are not ads), then I recommend that you either a) use the "old school" style with the Browser-Friendly service or b) don't use the Browser-Friendly service. All of the services that FeedBurner offers are optional, and none of them depend on each other, so you can pick and choose the ones you'd like.

I prefer the old format simply because it does not truncate my posts. I noticed a new behavior too: instead of downloading just the feed contents, Thunderbird 1.0 loads the entire webpage. This is really cumbersome. Can we have options here?

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