Blogniscient Fails to Keep Up
Blogniscient has redone their website. The old layout was unusable and
was known to cause epileptic seizures if you looked at it for a long
time (I’m lying about that last part, but it sounded funny – just take my word
for it, it was bad).
In the interest of keeping up with what’s new, I checked it out. Their
redesign is way better than what they had up there before, but
ultimately there is one huge, terrible fatal flaw. The links to the RSS
feeds are not on the main page. This is simply unacceptable for someone competing with sites like Memorandum and Digg.
In an age where we are bombarded and overloaded with information, new
web sites like this need capture our attention. By not having their RSS
feeds on the front page or easily accessible, Blogniscient fails at
capturing our attention and therefore fails altogether.
I tried, I really tried, to add the RSS feeds to SharpReader and I met
with failure every single time. Why should I bother to read this site
if they make it so hard to syndicate their site?
I use SharpReader which attempts to auto-discover RSS and atom feeds.
It’s good, but not perfect so I wasn’t surprised when the autodiscover
failed (heck it fails to discover the right one on my site!). Usually when this happens, I visit the site and look around for
orange XML icons or something that says RSS or ATOM. On their main
page, I found none. In order to actually find a feed, I had to
click on a category, scroll down (about halfway down the page) and find
the RSS 2.0 feed section. When I finally copied the link to their tech
RSS feed into SharpReader to enumerate it, I got a 404 error (it seems
to work today). Oh, Blogniscient {sigh}.
There are so many things that they can do right. First off, add a link
rel in the <head> of your main page. Make this link to the
"all"categories section. Something like this:
<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“yourtitlehere” href=“yourpathhere” />
Second,
on the front page, put a link to the RSS feeds next to the header of
the category and make sure that you link the category headers so that
they link to their respective pages. Something like this:
US POLITICS – Liberal (RSS) | Conservative (RSS)
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Technology (RSS)
Third, make sure that your service is working, no more 404s (this one is a bit more forgivable).
Oh and while I’m at it, make sure that your logo is clickable and links
to your main page. This tragic error happens all over the site.
Hopefully, they can solve these mistakes and stop losing readers. I for one won’t be coming back for a while…if ever.
