Rui CarmoIf there’s one thing you can take for granted on the Web, it is that you cannot, ever, please all sorts.
Every now and then, someone asks me whether or not I have a link feed of some kind, and my answer has always been: ‘Er, no, that’s why I have a Wiki, you see.’
But most people can’t be bothered to follow the full Wiki feed, what with the (often massive) batch updates I do every now and then – which tend to be a bit on the repetitive side as I update generic stuff about coding, devices, etc.
The iPhone Timeline is a typical case – the same page gets updated again, and again, and again, and people kind of lose interest. It’s great as archival/reference, but not that much interesting to people skimming the news.
And, with the new FeedBurner freebies, I confirmed that is indeed the case – I have ten times as many people subscribing to the blog-only feed than to the full Wiki feed.
Ironically, judging from the “Uncommon Uses” table in FeedBurner, splogs seem to be almost exclusively using the Wiki feed…
On the other hand, page views have been following the reverse trend – as people start adopting RSS as their main means for obtaining news, the growth in my RSS readership has been offset by a (still positive, but noticeably smaller) growth in page views.
So I decided to start a little experiment and hacked Yaki to support a link blog, which is (for the moment) only available on the front page and the full Wiki feed.
We’ll see how it goes, but right now I have a few things on my mind, such as playing around with RSS Advertising (which I have been thinking of doing for two years now).
For one thing, placing ads on the Wiki feed alone would have the neat side effect of annoying people who collect it for splogs.
I’ll keep you posted. For now, do enjoy the links. I’ve also tweaked the site CSS to use primarily “Helvetica”:Wikipedia:Helvetica if you have it installed.
It will take a while to get the right balance between “regular” content and links, but I think most readers will be happy.