Food feeds
If you haven’t visited CommonKitchen.com in the last few days, you may not have noticed that the site broke out in feeds this week. Actually, even if you have, you may not have noticed; the only real change was that the site is now littered with little orange icons which say “RSS”. And, if you use a browser which supports feed auto-discovery, it will display its own icon on many pages that indicates that there are feeds to be had. (There’s probably one displaying right now; this weblog has had a feed all along.)
So what’s a feed, and why did we add them to the site?
To grossly oversimplify, a feed is a way for you to “subscribe” to a page on the site. This is not a subscription like an e-mail subscription; in fact, one of the reasons we added feeds was to avoid sending our users more email which they may or may not actually want. Instead, the feed’s address is kept by some software on your end: either web-based software like Bloglines or Google Reader, an integrated part of your web browser (called “live bookmarks” or something like that), or a separate desktop application like Vienna or FeedDemon. You can add feeds to pages like My Yahoo! as well. That program automatically checks up at that address now and then, and if we’ve added anything to the feed, it grabs the new item and lets you know.
As an example of a place we’re using feeds on the site, check out the restaurant browsing pages. As you go through, you’ll see a feed icon on every page. If you subscribe, for example, to the feed for Bath, Maine, you’ll be notified by your feed-reading software every time a new restaurant is added in Bath. If you look at the page for your favorite cookbook, you can subscribe to two different feeds: one which will alert you to any new reviews of that cookbook, and another which tells you about any new recipes from that cookbook which are added to our site. All of this without requiring you to visit the site every day.
Then, if you don’t want to get these updates anymore, you can just tell your software to stop checking that feed. You don’t need to tell us; we didn’t know you “subscribed” in the first place. You don’t have to give us permission to send you email, or make sure we get through your spam filter, or any of the other inconveniences which come with email nowadays. As Steve Jobs says, it Just Works.
We’ve gone a little beyond these basic feeds, as well. Yahoo! offers a service called Pipes which allows for combination and filtering of data sources like feeds; we created a Pipe which combines the four feeds which list the most recent cookbooks, recipes, restaurants, or food websites added to our site, and presents them as one big feed. You can think of that as a “What’s New on Common Kitchen” feed if you’d like. I’m also thinking about making a “Boston Area” pipe which combines the restaurant feeds for Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Arlington, Newton, Brookline, Watertown, etc. into one big regional feed; you could probably build similar “regional” pipes for lots of other areas.
What could you do with our feeds? What other feeds should we add? Let us know, and we’ll get on it.
Update: We’ve added feeds to the Questions feature as well (remember that?) so you can use a feed to track new question additions, or track suggestions posted in response to one question.
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