New Media Initiatives

Many sites these days are offering an RSS feed of sorts, completely un-blog-related: airline deals, etc. Craigslist allows any search results to be subscribed to as RSS. The Walker calendar just finished an (unlaunched) RSS feed of custom searches - want to know when we're showing your favorite Matthew Barney film? Subscribe.

These non-blog RSS feeds are a very useful tool to drive traffic and increase attention and/or sales. As with everything we're talking about, the real trick is figuring out what makes sense to use them for.

Examples:

Great tool:

• http://mnartists.org/
  • Not technically a blog - we have feeds for almost every updated part of the site: events, news, artist uploads, category uploads, etc.
• http://press.walkerart.org/
  • should be a *cast - enclose the PDF
• http://channel.walkerart.org/
  • should be a vodcast - enclose the movie or audio

The Walker integrates RSS into the source XML because that's how our system works - what if yours is a legacy system in the middle of an upgrade or you just don't have time to mess with pulling the feed, parsing, styling, etc?

Walker's system integrates RSS into the source XML because that's how our system works - what if yours is a legacy system in the middle of an upgrade or you just don't have time to mess with pulling the feed, parsing, styling, etc?

Well, check it out:

• http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/

These guys have written a really cool php / javascript page and setup utility that generates a javascript code snippet that will automatically embed a feed in your page. It's better seen than talked about, I'll demo it if time allows.

They offer a free hosted version of the script, which makes setup take about 1 minute. Or you can download the PHP scripts and run it yourself in about 5 minutes - and then you have full control of the look and feel.

This is just one example, but I think it's clear how powerful, dynamic, and easy it can be to include feeds in other pages of your website.