Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Dave Winer's Subscribe button...

Dave Winer advocates the use of the word 'Subscribe'on buttons which lead to RSS feeds rather than 'XML', 'RSS', 'ATOM', 'FEED' or any other term. He says, straightforwardly:
The button should be white on orange and it should say, boldly, SUBSCRIBE.
However his own feed button says 'XML'.
Is this because he advocates a solution which results in an easy subscription process for anyone using any feed reader, and is waiting for the solution before changing his button?

After reading his post, I thought it made absolute sense to go with 'subscribe' (rather than 'XML' as I had at the time). But I had concerns that it was too soon and it it would be perhaps better to wait until a user friendly solution was in place before making the leap.

But in the end I decided 'subscribe' WAS better, right now. And so I changed my button to subscribe and I also added a help button to help inform users about RSS. I posted the results of my research and decisions in the form of a four step plan for making RSS feeds more user friendly.

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