Life is grand

because it’s just one of those things our users shouldn’t have to worry about.

While Greg’s post is interesting it really comes down to that in the end; Users shouldn’t have to worry. They shouldn’t have to care how feeds are reaped or why a feed they are subscribed to hasn’t updated.

I doubt Greg or Nick Bradbury are making excuses but having worked on feed aggregation software it is difficult to make any case to users. Some see it as making excuses, some don’t care as they just want their feed reaped. Others shrug and point at another aggregator which, unluckily for your system, got to the feed in time. Often feeds are unreliable; hit them once, twice, three times and they work, hit them a fourth time and they fail. You then penalise it but had you hit it the fifth time it might have worked.

Or they have some shoddily custom-made desktop feed reader that has no qualms about abusing a feed. To the user the feeds work in that system and not yours, no matter how temporary or short-sighted it is.

Involving the user in the details of your problems is not going to help. It is interesting for us fellow developers, interesting for tech users of the software and interesting to yourself but most users just want their information.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.