Other Methods

RSS feeds for comments – Already discussed in the example above, this feature is usually used by bloggers. Instead of having to visit a specific blog again and again just to check if the author or someone else has responded to your comment, this allows users to simply subscribe to the RSS feed for the comments of a specific post.

RSS feeds by Category/Topic – If your website or blog deals with a wide variety of topics generating RSS feeds per category of topic is a good way of giving your readers control over the kind of content they receive. For example if you have a website about pets you will surely have a wide range of topics since there are all kinds of pets to consider like cats, dog, birds, mice, lizards, etc. If a regular visitor to your site is interested in birds only then by having an RSS feed for the category Birds will surely be a lot useful to that visitor since he/she won’t have to slog through updates of all kinds of pets just to find the articles or content related to birds.

Making RSS feeds by category is not that hard thanks to tags. Instead of thinking of really sophisticated means of categorizing your content you can simply tag them and make feeds for each tag-based category.

RSS feeds by Search String/Keywords – This is similar to RSS feeds by Category/Topic. The main difference is that instead of predetermined categories a user can subscribe to the search results yielded by the search string he/she enters. You can say that this is very good for the user indeed since the content he gets is very specific and targeted to his needs. For example instead of just getting updates on birds, which is still very general, the user can search for “Parrot Training” and end up with very specific material instead of a lot of material about birds he doesn’t really need.