In the last year, I've become a bit of an RSS junkie. I've also developed some rather strong opinions on the nature of feed content.
It isn't that I didn't use RSS feeds before, but — aside from iGoogle page widgets for Lifehacker's headlines and the release notes for the latest version of Calibre — I couldn't find a natural place in my life to use a newsreader application.What changed? I got a smart phone. (My phone and newsreader app of choice are topics for another time.)
However, upon becoming a regular user of RSS feeds, I quickly acquired a sense for both good and not-so-good feeds. I also discovered that the quality of the content on a website can be surprisingly unhelpful for predicting the quality of newsfeed content.
LD OnLine is a good illustration.
The website, ldonline.org is excellent! It's hands down one of my favorites on the topic of learning differences, and I highly recommend it. The content is well organized and addresses a fairly wide variety of audiences. The design is clean and professional, yet still friendly and approachable. Are there points that I would take issue with? Of course, but most are ubiquitous interface issues I've learned to tolerate (or hide).
In concept, the primary RSS feed "LD OnLine Daily News" is equally good — noteworthy headlines about learning differences and special education from a variety of Internet news sources. The problem is implementation. These were the three latest items in the feed when I started writing this post. I reformatted things to fit into a blog post and added the character counts in the left margin.
- Content within this box is from LD OnLine Daily News http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldonline/news?format=xml (Accessed 26 Jan 2012).
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Brain Scans Spot Early Signs of Dyslexia
January 26, 2012 09:00 192 charsInstead of waiting for a child to experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as poor…
496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.
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Special Educators Borrow from Brain Studies
January 26, 2012 09:00 -
195 charsWhile some educators remain skeptical, brain research is slowly migrating from the lab into the classroom, both in predicting which students may have learning difficulties and intervening to help…
496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.
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Apps for Children with Dyslexia
January 26, 2012 09:00 -
193 charsThe parent of a second grader newly diagnosed with dyslexia wrote me asking if I knew of any apps that might help her son with reading and math. She'd searched and come up with nothing — and so…
496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.
Even without the character counts, two things are readily apparent about the second paragraph of each item: (1) it's considerably longer than the first, and (2) it's the same in all three items. The character counts show that the second paragraph isn't just longer, it's more than 2½ times longer!
On closer scrutiny, I noticed two more issues. While the longer second paragraph is promoting LD Online's LD NewsLine service
and encouraging the reader to sign up for the service, it doesn't provide a link to the signup page. Additionally, the fourth sentence — the one beginning A weekly version…
— is redundant. The reader already learned, in the second sentence, the service sends a weekly email.
I'm really disappointed that such a great website has so many problems in its RSS feed. If the feed content anywhere near the same quality as the website content, I'd have an RSS widget listing those headlines on this blog.
