RSS And The Hero Portal

RSS And The Hero Portal by Brian Kelly | Feb 13, 2007 | RSS | 17 comments I recently received a copy of “Hero Headlines” which contains news from Hero Ltd, “ the company behind the UK’s official online gateway to higher education and research opportunities “. The newsletter included an article about the new-look HERO Web site, which was relaunched in November 2006. The article mentioned that the Web site now makes use of RSS. Looking at the What is RSS? page I was pleased to find that RSS is being used not only for news, but also for syndication of feature articles and press releases. In addition the Web site explains what RSS is and provides helpful advice on using RSS readers. Well done, Hero. I think a national order zithromax in uk portal to UK Universities, such as Hero, helps to maximise awareness of and access to information about the sector. (I should disclose, BTW, that I was a member of a Hero Technical Advisory Group, several years ago). But what else could a national portal such as Hero provide? How about: An RSS feed for search results Direct access to RSS feeds from individual institutions Geographical metadata for pages about individual institutions A Google Maps mashup providing additional information about the institutions An OPML feed which aggregates the various RSS feeds I’ll talk some more about these issues in future postings – but for now I’d be interested in what you might like to see from a national portal. Technorati Tags : RSS 17 Comments Roddy MacLeod on February 13, 2007 at 11:20 am Brian, The Hero feeds are fine, and the advice on RSS at the Hero site is reasonable, though I don’t think its complete. For example, some people who click on their RSS buttons, will be presented with: – – HERO | Latest Features Features from the HERO site … The above means nothing to most people. Likewise, many who click on the UK Web Focus RSS button will see: – – – UK Web Focus http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com … What are they to make of this? Another example – When I click on the RSS feed button on The Bookseller website, I am asked whether I want to save a file. RSS is not user friendly enough, at the present time. There seems no way to explain, in simple terms, all the various ways to subscribe/what subscribing means/and exactly how to subscribe. Or am I missing something? Roddy

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