3 thoughts on “Nick Harris: Creating a Pleasant User Experience”

  1. Nick, thanks for the heads up on the articles.
    Oddly enough they reminded me of a completely off-topic question: You’ve talked a lot about consuming feeds and how many sites have non-standard, broken or just plain poor feeds and as someone about to write code to produce feeds I was curious if you had any suggetions or helpful hints/locations.
    I’m basically looking for “An Overworked Software Developers Cliff Notes to Producing a Valid RSS Feed”

  3. Shawn, this earlier post of mine may be helpful:
    http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/fixing_funky_fe_1.html
    And also check out this post from the Google Reader team:
    http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds.html
    Here are a few other tips:
    * Use unique identifiers for your posts, and don’t change them. We frequently see feeds that contain duplicate or missing GUIDs, and we’ve even seen some sites change each post’s GUID every time the feed is retrieved.
    * Don’t use HTML in any element other than the description.
    * Properly escape HTML in your descriptions (or use CDATA sections).
    * Include each item’s publication date, since otherwise an aggregator can only show when an item was received.

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