The “Syndicate” page has been updated, which you could tell from its emphasized status on the menu bar if you were actually at the site. I’m afraid one day my RSS feed will start getting more hits than my main page, and that will be a very sad day indeed.
Why will that be sad? I mean, I read you in RSS but I am always popping in to comment. It helps me comment more, so I interact more, so I know more, and I learn more … and isn’t that ultimately what you want?
We are all constantly challenged to think and then think again about our perceptions of the Internet…
Been meaning to ask you – your feeds have been giving me issues in NewzGator. Might just be specific to that tool – I think it works for Christine in Newsreader.
Also, are your RSS feeds also served up behind SSL?
I can see the bittersweetness in having more traffic for RSS than for the main site. Yes, both of them focus on the main writing and content of the site – which is the bulk, but not the entirety, of the Photomatt Experience. (That should be a new-age Los Angeles museum. Anyway.) There are all sorts of tidbits – everything on the right hand bar, for instance – that make Photomatt an engaging site, in addition to the main content. It’s something of a shame to lose the user interaction for all those pieces as well.
But, like Christine said, the feeds are often an easier way to keep closer to the actual content, which is the bulk of the work. It’s a tradeoff.
Mike, everything on the site is available through SSL, although the photolog might drop out of secure every now and then. (You might need to get the feeds from photomatt.net/xml rather than xml.photomatt.net. I serve the feeds from a subdomain so I can track the stats individually, but I don’t remember if the cert is good for the subdomain as well.) The biggest downside of the RSS feeds so far has been that it’s influencing what I write, which seems antithetical to their purpose. Suddenly my relative links are a no-no, and (for some versions) higher HTML entities need to be stripped.
Of course, as Christine said, if it increases the feedback on content and the breadth of the audience, those are tradeoffs that would make me think twice before blowing RSS off. I know Christine comments more, because she says so, but what about the rest of the world? I’m not anti-RSS, per se, I’m just pro-experience. Maybe a good analogy would be reading an ebook rather than reading a well-done hardcover while lounging in a hammock. That might be taking it far, but I have hammocks on the mind.
I fully understand the arguments on the other side though, and in a move to completely contradict myself I’m planning on adding some more RSS features to the site tonight. If I’m going to have feeds I might as well have feeds for every single thing possible. My goal is 20 feeds, a number arrived at completely arbitrarily. Just because.