Quote:
Originally Posted by jacked
I've said this a few times and had little response which is surprising considering how many people supposedly have large networks of blogs, we offer custom RSS feeds to any of our affiliates that have enough traffic. Reason being that most sponsor hosted feeds have one specific look to them and that doesn't always fit with the look of the affiliates blogs/sites and by giving them the option of using a custom feed we can customize the feed to look whichever way they may want.
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Last fall I managed to find around 35 sponsors (some with multiple sites) who claimed to have feeds for blogs: just 7 validated fully and about twice that number failed validation. Then you start to look at those you might actually want to display on your sites...
And if you imagine things are getting better, you would be wrong. A few sponsors have added feeds in the past few months, but at least a half dozen from my original list have already quit. Earlier this week I tried to find feeds for a babes site and only by including marginally fetish sites was I eventually able to find
two with decent text and nice pics which didn't break my layout.
My issue with the idea of "custom" feeds is that all I need is vanilla content, free of styling. Give me that and my CSS will make it match my site. Most of the problems arise with sponsors who impose their own formatting, the effect of which can be anything from creating minor inconsistencies in my layouts to actually breaking them. Shouldn't it be obvious that if your content is going to (hopefully) be hosted on hundreds of different sites, you must leave it to those sites to handle the way it is displayed?
From the sponsor point of view there is a major downside to RSS feeds, which is that there is limited value for anyone in a blog adding more than a handful of new posts each day. So if too many sponsors were to provide feeds and update too frequently, few would see much return. However we aren't close to that point yet, and if someone is providing feeds, why not take an extra step to ensure they are usuable and likely to generate $$$.