I spent the spring break in Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Washington DC. I was working with the web branch team to create RSS feeds for a few sections of the websites. The RSS feeds had to manually generated for two reasons. The website uses a CMS that didn’t support RSS natively. Many sections were not updated in a manner suitable for generating feeds.
Some quirks I noticed while working on the project:
* RSS 2.0 is not a standard yet. ATOM the competing format has been approved by IETF.
* RSS 2.0 spec is copyrighted by Harvard University under creative common license
* IE6 doesn’t recognizes RSS XML files. Many enterprise applications are still support only on IE6
* Analytics on RSS is a challenge. It is not easy to find the number of subscribers without using third party services Feedburner. Feedburner has only a limited free service.
* Apple refuses to the use the conventional orange icon for RSS; may be due to its similarity with thier AirPort icon.
* Most website have the RSS icons unobtrusively in the corners, hence many users don’t notice them.