What is RSS anyway?
Hello all. Time is flying by. I wake up on Monday and drag myself off to work. It seems like one big long day and I'm driving myself home Friday evening. The weekends go by even faster. Every evening and weekend I have a list of things to do. Some days I hang in there and make a little progress, some days I add more to the list than I can get done, and some days my brain just refuses to join the fun.
I managed to get my RSS working in the last two weeks. This is still new to me. I had the RSS and subscription icons out there. That was easy. But I hadn't made the connection in my brain regarding how that little icon actually does anything. Then in the middle of the night one night, I woke up with a clear picture of how this is supposed to work. Yes, this sort of thing really happens. I use a tool called Easy RSS provided with my hosting package. I created a feed. I picked the formatting and chose whether to show a header or title to the feed, text size and color, width and other fun stuff. In return, the program provides the code to integrate the RSS feed into my web page. I pasted the code into the web page where I want it to show and poof!, there it is. I also had the option to create a template for my RSS to match my site. It was amazingly easy. I opened one of my pages in a text editor, SAVED it to the name provided to me by Easy RSS, and deleted the content I didn't want. Once I place that template file in the location they indicated, AND pasted the code onto my pages where I want it to show, I had an RSS feed. The template is used when I have a teaser with a "read on" link. If you click the link, you will go to a new page containing whatever your template file contained plus the full article. I may have been the last soul on the planet that didn't know what RSS was or how it worked but if you are lost like I was, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I'm not sure the world needed another acronym but here we have it. If you're still lost, here's the gist of it. You've seen those cute little orange square icons popping up on every web page you visit. They may be in the address bar or on the page itself. If you click on that, you will receive new feeds as they are posted. It's kind of like a bookmark. On my computer, the icon shows up in the tools area of my browser. When I click on it, a pull down menu type list appears with the "articles" for that feed. This means you don't have to go to the web site to see if something new has been added. How cool is that? There are also free subscription service links that will compile your feeds so you can get all of your subscriptions in one place... news, weather, sports and knitting. I haven't tried that yet. It's on the list somewhere but we do have links to those on our site. I set my RSS up as a teaser. You know what this is. It's the headline and a sentence or two that gets your interest and then a "read on" link. How clever. I felt like my home page had way too much information on it that no one really cared about. Now you get a teaser on the home page and you can click to read more if you like. So far, I've used this as a tool to annouce sales and "coming soon" product. Cool.
If you've visited in the last week, you've noticed a few changes. I finally lost the cute font. It will still show up in my catalog pages but the main pages are a "normal" font now. I like it but it still needs work like everything else in my life. I also moved the store hours to the left navigation bar and removed the jibber jabber. I plan to have "featured" product and such on the home page now. This is an evolution from thinking locally to thinking about web shoppers and what they want to see. I don't want to leave anyone out so I'm trying to work toward a balance.
In the meantime, I've been working OT at the regular J-O-B and shoving this stuff into any little teeny time slot I can find where my brain is still willing to cooperate. I've been hitting the "social" scene on the web. I'm not a socially outgoing person. Duh! And even though every ecommerce article I read tells me I need to get out there and mingle with my customers on the web, I just didn't see where I could fit it in. Surprise! It's actually fun and I've met a lot of really cool people. I've always been a little removed from our shop since I live 250 miles away and do the behind-the-scenes stuff. Now I can talk to our customers and see what kinds of cool things they are working on. I've always loved the in-person interaction at the store. We have the best customers... talented and smart and nice. I'm finding the social side of the web site to be very refreshing and inspiring. I may actually step away from the computer and knit! What a concept!
Till next time,
Sandy
