Facibus On Blogging

As bloggers we generally provide RSS feeds for the convenience of our readers.

No-one would argue that it should be as easy as possible for our readers to subscribe to our feeds (well, some might argue otherwise, and if you are one of them, please leave me a comment ).

I generally read RSS feeds on my Nokia e61 phone. It has a small screen, and a growing number of people read feeds in just this way, because it is a good way to while away time spent waiting for meetings to start, planes to land, and all of those other dead spots in an otherwise busy day.

Like a lot of people, I discover new feeds by links from existing ones - and generally read the linked-to article before deciding to subscribe to the feed.

This brings me to Boyd’s Law of Small Format RSS Readers number 1: Make the article easy to find in the page. Some blog templates force a lot of piffle (affiliate links, top comment stars, blogrolls, you name it) between the top of the page and where the article starts - which matters not on a large format (normal laptop/desktop) screen but really gets in the way on a small format screen like that of the e61. If you want specific examples, leave me a comment and I’ll post some screenshots of good and bad blog templates for small format readers. User centered design 101: if you want it to be used, make it usable.

Boyd’s Law of Small Format RSS Readers number 2: If you know that your blog has a lot of small format readers, think about how to make the articles themselves small-format friendly. This means keeping big diagrams simple, minimising the use of YouTube and other video if you’re targeting small-format readers.

Like I said, if you want specific examples of small format friendly templates, let me know.