I’ve been trying to figure out if I want to change anything with the RSS feed(s) on this site. In the past, I’ve always had just 1 (known) RSS feed that listed the last 10 posts (full text) and gave a hint in the title to how many comments were attached to that post.
This method works just fine, but I think it could be improved on.
A few of the ideas I’ve had about what changes I would like to make:
- Providing RSS feeds for my daily links.
- Providing more posts per RSS feed (perhaps 20, or the last 2 weeks worth).
- Perhaps providing ATOM or some other type of RSS feed.
- Providing my sitemap to more than just Google (will talk about in just a second).
I’m not sure all of these are needed, useful, or worth putting together, but I thought I would put them out in the air in case I get the comments finished by the time you see this.
I mentioned making the Google sitemap a little more public. For those of you who don’t know, Google has created a way for webmasters to control what the spider sees and doesn’t see. It’s similiar to the Robots.txt file, but much more detailed, going into things like how often pages are updated, etc.
I believe sitemaps help increase pagerank, but I’ve never actually been able to prove it… I know though that it does help insure that certain pages DO get into the index without having to wait for the spider to stumble on them. If you want to learn more about sitemaps in general, be sure to check out http://www.google.com/sitemaps.html
So why would I want to make my sitemap public? Simple: I believe that it won’t be long until we start seeing more and more programs that can make use of sitemaps, as they provide very useful tools for browsing a website. In fact, I’m one of those people that actually look for a sitemap at the bottom of the page to see if there is a faster way for me to find what I’m looking for. Strange I know…
Off topic time: On a more personal note, congrats to Nikki on wherever she is going next year. By the time this post goes live, she should be just receiving exact word as to where she will be posted.