Archive for the ‘RSS’ Category
Mastering RSS Publishing : 9 Practical Tips
Leon Ho, the Brisbane-based editor of A-list productivity blog LifeHack.org, sparked my inspiration today with a post on his personal blog, titled 0 to 12,000 RSS Subscribers. As his post title reveals, Leon shares several tips that might help you reach a larger readership on your blog within a relatively short amount of time.
First I bookmarked Leon’s post on del.icio.us (direct link to all bookmarks for Leon’s post), then I turned on coComment tracking so that I could follow the conversation. Still, I had some ideas of my own that would fit in nicely with Leon’s and I thought I’d submit a comment myself to add my own 2 cents to the story.
Unfortunately, Leon’s blog comment form seems to lack any basic kind of formatting so I decided I might as well devote an entire blog post to my take on increasing your subscriber base, although I realized all too well my subscriber count is at a mere 1% of his.
Summarizing Leon’s tips: use full feeds, give the RSS icon a prominent
position, provide consistent, high-quality content, offer email
subscriptions and make it easy for people to share your posts with their friends.
I’d like to a couple more tips to the mix that seemed to make a huge difference for me:
- Use large, attractive feed icons, preferably the ones that by now have become the defacto standard. They are freely available for download from FeedIcons. Host the icons yourself.
- Obvious to some: offer a browser-friendly version of your feed with FeedBurner and display the number of subscribers by embedding a FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet into your page, if you dare.
- Let people browse your feeds live from your pages by embedding a piece of code in the sidebar of your site. Really it’s not that difficult. Pick any of the many excellent tools so diligently demonstrated by David Rothman on his current and comprehensive, hands-on review page here: RSS to Web Page: Tool Output Examples.
- Make your feeds auto-discoverable and double-check that they are auto-discoverable indeed. Most blog hosting services take care of this already. If not: make sure the header of your pages contains code like this:
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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog Posts Feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cleverclogs" />
- Stick to a certain average posting frequency. To be totally honest I personally need to apply this principle to my own working discipline. When people first add your feed to their aggregator, the feed is likely to be included in a group called Probation or something similar. While your feed is there it has the attention from your subscriber. Your goal is to convince that reader to move your feed to a more permanent group, preferably the one named High Priority. So it’s ok if you don’t blog every day, as only a few people would be able to keep up anyway—just don’t drop the frequency to below once every two weeks. People lose interest or even get annoyed and bounce you off their list.
- Validate your feeds. Paste your feed URLs at feed a validator, such as FeedValidator. Fix errors.
- Consider offering email subscriptions through R|Mail. I’ve noticed a 20% increase since I signed up with Randy Morin’s service. Recipients are apparently very satisifed with how the posts are delivered. R|Mail is free.
- Subscribe to your own feed, both as a feed and by email, so that you know what your subscribers are receiving. Open the email version through web mail: sometimes the plain-text version looks awful. Switch to a different RSS-to-email service if this happens.
Attractive Feed Widgets from MuseStorm: Publish, Share and Track
Excellent news from Pete Cashmore on Mashable this morning. In his post MuseStorm Launches Widget Tracking he announces that MuseStorm has extended its feed widget arsenal in several dimensions: not only does it now offer various feed widgets both for the desktop and for websites, but it also offers detailed analytics to feed publishers.
The MuseStorm people themselves call their new service the MuseStorm Widget Syndication Service, as they proudly announced in yesterday’s blog post It’s alive! MuseStorm Widget Syndication Service launches.
Needless to say I signed up for the MuseStorm service straight away, following the feed configuration steps offered by the MuseStorm Flash wizard:
Within minutes I had produced a slick, animated-headlines version of the bookmarks that I keep in my del.icio.us RSSonate account:
Note that I resized the widget just to demonstrate that the feed widget can be widened. Several skins and other customizations are offered. Do you see the +sign in the bottom-left corner? It allows visitors of my site to copy the widget to their blog. You can also follow this link: RSSonate Feed Widget.
In addition to Google Gadget and Yahoo! Widget versions for the desktop, feed widget publishers can embed their code into any online web page. You don’t need access to your page templates: just embed the code into your sidebar or even in the body of a blog post.
Here’s a screenshot of the widget selector box:
Widget Analytics
The base MuseStorm service for publishing feed widgets is free. The Analytics module is charged at USD4 per feed per month, with the first two months free for all users. At this moment my own Analytics panel is rather boring because my panel wasn’t online until I published this post. As soon as people start clicking on any of the links inside the panel and the clickthrough numbers start showing up, I’ll upload another screenshot. This is what the MuseStorm Analytics Dashboard looks like:
And here’s a screenshot of the page where my dazzling metrics will appear:
For Developers
There is an extensive MuseStorm SDK section on the website for programmers who want to explore the MuseStorm API with its specific command set based on Javascript.
MuseStorm Roadmap
At this moment support for the Mac desktop is limited to the Yahoo! Widget. Mac Desktop is planned for release though, as well as support for mobile and IM widgets. Keep an eye on the MuseStorm blog, aptly titled Riding the Storm: it seems to me they’ve got some cool releases up their sleeves.
Impressions
I don’t know how I could have missed the MuseStorm gamma while doing research for web-based RSS tickers, but for me this beats everything I’ve tried so far—both in features and pricing. Would you do me a favor and try out the widget? Click on the links inside it, see how easy you find it copy the widget to your own web site and then let me know if you think I should replace FeedBurner’s Headline Animator with the MuseStorm one.
Rendering Feeds in Firefox 2.0
"Then Firefox 2.0 ruined it all. Everybody knew beforehand that the
Mozilla developers were going to introduce enhanced support for RSS: Firefox 2.0
would make it easier to use one’s own preferred RSS aggregator and there’d be an
RSS viewer. "
Though I wasn’t a very early adopter of FeedBurner—I only signed up little over
two years ago—I’ve always very much appreciated that I could offer my visitors a
formatted version of my web feeds using the BrowserFriendly feed optimization
method. Basically this service adds a stylesheet to your feeds so that they
don’t look ugly with <xml> tags when displayed in a browser.
Then Firefox 2.0 ruined it all. Everybody knew beforehand that the Mozilla
developers were going to introduce enhanced support for RSS: Firefox 2.0
would make it easier to use your own preferred RSS aggregator and there’d be an
RSS viewer. Well, contrary to my expectation, they did not integrate the code
from the excellent FeedView extension by Tom Germeau, even worse: they made
Firefox 2.0 insert its own displeasing stylesheet, overriding any existing one,
whether or not the feed was created with a 3rd-party service like
FeedBurner.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one complaining about this: luckily the
FeedBurner team recently improved the BrowserFriendly service so that the
original stylesheet is re-enabled, thus effectively restoring the original
FeedBurner rendering of your feeds in Firefox. Just tick the box "Always use my
selected landing page in all browsers" in the BrowserFriendly settings of the
Optimize Feed section and you’re all set.
Try the FeedBurner BrowserFriendly version of my newly created feed CleverJots, for
example. CleverJots is the feed that I’m currently also displaying in an
experimental, animated widget at the top of my blog, rotating a mash-up of
personal IM-like jotlets loosely joint with bookmarks from several of my
del.icio.us bookmark accounts.
There are a few caveats that Eric Lunt was kind enough to point out to me:
the proper stylesheet is only displayed when you click on a hyperlink that leads
to a BrowserFriendly FeedBurner feed. It won’t work if you manually type the URL
of the feed directly in your browser address bar. Secondly, sometimes your
browser cache may contain a copy of the previous rendering of the feed, causing
you to think that the BrowserFriendly service isn’t working well. If you clear
the cache, all should be well.
Another improvement to the BrowserFriendly service that’s mostly of interest
to non-English speakers is that you can choose to display your feed’s
subscription instructions in several languages: Spanish, French, Polish, Dutch,
German, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese and Russian. Several native speakers helped
to provide the translations.
If Firefox add-ons are your thing, there’s one that I find indispensable and
that you might find of use too: RSS Panel,
created by Johannes La Poutré. Once installed RSS Panel displays an orange
drop-down panel in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, showing you the
most recent feed entries tied to the page you are visiting. In collapsed state
it looks like this:
And this screenshot shows RSS Panel in expanded state for CleverClogs:
RSS Panel is available both as a Firefox add-on
(aka extension) and as a Greasemonkey user script.
As an aside: this last screenshot painfully but clearly illustrates why from today I’m going to refrain
from posting del.icio.us bookmarks to my blog: they make me lazy and make my
site look rather bland. So as I see it now the bookmarks will go into the animated widget at the top of the page and I’ll be doing some proper blogging again.
Update November 30th, 2006: I’ve found several very interesting blog posts and conversations on the web:
Howto Disable Firefox 2’s Feed Preview by Paul Baker on October 27th, 2006. Paul’s post explains how to modify the file feedconverter.js so that Firefox no longer inserts its own stylesheet. (Pointer gratefully received from Mike Kowalchik of Grazr.com)
firefox, rss, xsl - from anger to apathy on 0xDECAFBAD, November 7th, 2006. In the light of the Feed Preview ‘misfeature’ Lee Orchard—XML/RSS/OPML expert—considers giving up geekhood in favor of farming sheep. I’d say "once a geek, always a geek". Besides, some geeks keep sheep (I do).
Firefox 2 Feed Support on Tins, October 5th, 2006. Rick Klau (of FeedBurner) is disappointed too by the fact that FeedBurner feeds are no longer displayed with their original stylesheets. In short: "But where publishers include an XSLT declaration - especially where that XSLT is superior to Firefox 2’s own - they should pass it through."
XML in Firefox is a Major Problem lengthy thread on the Google Group mozilla.dev.apps.firefox, started by Adam Scheinberg on November 2nd, 2006 and still running. Opponents (among whom Mark Pilgrim) and proponents (from the Mozilla Dev camp) defend their point of view. Several solutions are being offered, but so far it doesn’t seem like the Mozilla Foundation is going to withdraw their decision. Note that there are several other threads in this group that are relevant to the discussion.
XML+RSS with XSLT in Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 short thread on MozillaZine from August, 2006, which has this ’solution’: "You can force mozilla to render the document as xml (using your style)
by ensuring that the rss tag does not appear within the first 512
bytes."
Feed View overrides XSLT stylesheet defined in XML document Bugzilla entry started by François Gagné in May 2006 (!). Although this conversation is still running, commenters are requested to post their submissions to the Google Groups thread (listed as #4 here).
Custom styles for RSS, a wiki page on the Mozilla Development Documentation Center proposes three solutions to work around the Firefox Feed Preview feature:
- putting the
<rss>content in a prefixed namespace - preceding the
<rss>element with an XML comment - serving the content as UTF-16
KMWorld Offers Personalized Feeds
I just discovered that KMWorld offers personalized feeds. Basically this means that you can subscribe to any keyword from the KMWorld website and be notified in your RSS reader when someone uses that word in an article. I always cheer silently when website publishers implement feeds based on custom keywords. I think it’s the ultimate courtesy to your site visitors.
First I wanted to be sure KMWorld was delivering on the expectations that it was putting up: in the following screenshot you can see how I’m using the KMWorld custom feed service to track mentions of the word ’KMWorld’ [!]:
I first checked out the full list of sources covered by TagJag!, Chris Pirillo’s keyword-to-OPML service. The TagJag! service is very easy to use: just enter any keyword that you would like to track and the OPML file is generated for you.
TagJag! OPML URLs look like this: http://www.tagjag.com/blogs/aggregators/opml/, that is, if you want to create a list of feeds from blog searches for the keyword ’aggregators’. OPML files generated in this way can automatically be viewed using your preferred OPML browser now that OPML auto-discovery has been enabled on all TagJag! search results pages—just install the OPML auto-discovery extension for Firefox for this. The OPML URL is persistent and dynamic, which means that you can subscribe to be notified of updates to the feed list.
I must say I really like the visual make-over Pirillo’s developers have been putting in place over the last few months. Still, it seems the KMWorld Personalized Feed service isn’t listed among the 178 engines that TagJag! can query. I notified Chris, of course. He once told me that any search engine that accepts a url parameter of this kind http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword qualifies to be included in the TagJag! list of search engines. Send your own TagJag! submissions to info@tagjag.com.
Assuming knowledge management workers most likely have some affinity with online research, I also checked if ResearchBuzz blogger and Google guru pur sang Tara Calishain had included the KMWorld offering in her list of engines queried through her Kebberfegg tool.
Kebberfegg is a keyword-based RSS feed generator similar to TagJag!, but with a different angle and a different scope. Kebberfegg does generate an OPML file, but it doesn’t host it for you. You’ll have to grab it off the screen and save it to a file, which makes it static. Tara encourages submissions too: send them to tools - at - researchbuzz.com.
The last site I checked was John Tropea’s blog Library clips: I used a simple Google Blog search query to search "KMWorld" on Library clips, but there weren’t search results at all. John’s blog is encyclopedic with regard to RSS, OPML and advanced search technologies, so if he hasn’t covered it, then indeed, this must be a new service by KMWorld.
Publish Your Desktop to the Web: YourMinis is Live
The Goowy developers let the cat out of the bag yesterday by announcing the availability of YourMinis.com, a fully-configurable web-based desktop based on Flash. Everything about YourMinis is configurable and redistributable: you can create as many tabs as you like and drag so-called minis onto them. Minis are widgets with specific functionality: from PIM applets such as calendar, notes and to-do lists to bookmarks, photos, videos, email, weather, stock quotes, it’s all there. Similar to applying a regular desktop wallpaper the tab background and the title bar of each mini can be individually changed. Here’s a screenshot of what you can create in just a few minutes after signing up:
Even in pre-release mode YourMinis offers quite strong support for RSS reading already: it comes with a preloaded catalog of popular feed categories, you can add as many feeds of your own as you like and even import an OPML file from your local hard drive. Feeds can be viewed as a quicklist (with each entry’s contents in a pop-up) or as a regular two-pane browser.
The nice thing about YourMinis is that everything about it is dynamic, interactive and very attractive to the eye. From the YourMinis team blog I understand the developers are proud they have some outstanding graphic designers on board.
Click on this badge to open a transparent, live version of the very same tab:
Each mini has a drop-down menu icon containing a list of functions that are specific to that mini: for the Flickr widget these are functions like Thumb View, Full View, Photo Search, User View and Set As Background.
Published tabs are differentiated from unpublished ones through a little orange antenna next to the tab drop-down menu icon. Apart from embedding a tab on a website, you can also point your visitors to a full-page version of the tab: my public page for example is at http://ct.yourminis.com/cleverclogs. It seems you can create as many pages as you like. At this moment I’m also displaying my GMail account on the tab, I’m not so sure I’m going to keep it that way.
YourMinis.com roadmap
According to the Welcome to yourminis.com blogpost several impressive enhancements are on the drawing board already:
- a browser plugin for quick access to your personalized page (Firefox and Flock add-ons to be launched first, others to follow)
- auto-detection of web feeds, videos and other data sources on pages that you visit with the option to add those to your personal page
- tabs for communities with the option to for community members to contribute and subscription to tabs
- YourMinis badges
Suggestions for improvements
YourMinis still deserves the ’beta’ epithet: it sometimes behaves a bit unexpectedly and still seems a tiny bit rough on the edges. At one stage earlier today the service became unresponsive and I had to close the Firefox tab and reload the service. I had no unsaved data on any of my tabs, so this wasn’t a big deal for me. Then, while preparing this blog post the Flickr mini lost connection to my photo stream and showed no images. Several other minis were added to my tab without my asking. There’s a YourMinis support forum where users can connect to the developers directly and bring up issues.
Track what others wrote
I quickly created a news radar for YourMinis (thanks for choosing a unique name ;-))
Search Clouds Increase Relevance of Search Results
On reflection it’s actually striking that so far Google hasn’t embraced any kind of topic clustering functionality outside of its ’Similar Pages’ feature. I’m not the only one to feel this need: recently Arc90 lead architect Joel Nagy also investigated into this area and quietly published about the research he did into contextual relevance of pages found through search queries, with ’Search Clouds’ as the central idea.
No matter how precise your keyword query, search engines don’t always produce the type of results that is relevant for your research goal. So far I’ve constructed hundreds of compound and advanced search queries myself and each time I’m surprised about the noise that inevitably slips into the search results. Some of these erroneous results can only be detected with the human brain. Yesterday, for example, Fred Zelders sent me an email message to inform me about an irrelevant search result in one of the blog search feeds in RSSonate, my RSS-in-the-blogosphere monitor. I really needed to read the post to which he referred twice before I could confirm he was correct in his observation:
Surprisingly RSS in this case stands for ’Random Shutdown Syndrome’, an ailment from which quite a few Macbooks notebook computers seem to suffer, where apparently they start to randomly reboot themselves. On further investigation I was actually stunned to discover that AbbreviationZ (an afiiliate of Answers.com) lists 40 additional ways to resolve the abbreviation RSS.
Fred’s feedback is expecially valuable to me because he is very knowledgeable about RSS and OPML technology. I know he subscribes to RSSonate ever since I launched it and in turn I often visit FeedFiles—a comprehensive repository of RSS tools—to see if he or his son perhaps already reviewed.the RSS tools I’m discovering. Fred’s blog Fred on OPML is in English, his other writings seem to all be exclusively in Dutch.
Over the years I’ve seen a couple of initiatives and attempts to cluster search results around topics of interest. Clusty immediately comes to mind of course. Another way to improve the precision/noise ratio is by using advanced syntax techniques, like category, tag or in-title search.The major search engines and some of the blog search engines offer query modifiers like these to improve the search results. Other engines allow you to indicate the scope of your search: for example, commercial vs non-commercial search results. If I recall well Yahoo! offers this, but as a search engine it just won’t click with me.
On reflection it’s actually striking that so far Google hasn’t embraced any kind of topic clustering functionality outside of it’s ’Similar Pages’ feature. I’m not the only one to feel this need: recently Arc90 lead architect Joel Nagy also investigated into this area and quietly published about the research he did into contextual relevance of pages found through search queries, with ’Search Clouds’ as the central idea. Joel mocked up this impression of what a Google search query containing the words ’Nintendo’ ’Wii’ ’launch’ and ’date’ could look like if it were accompanied by Search Clouds:
I like the implications of Joel’s research: it clearly shows how useful it would be to have his concept of Search Clouds implemented in search engines, giving an immediate clue which page could be most relevant to my research goal. Imagine that in my search engine profile I could also maintain a persistent list of tags and keywords; Search Clouds would then be able to visually indicate to what extent a search result is likely to match my profile…
The Arc90 sandbox Arc90 Lab has been on my radar ever since I discovered their Link Thumbnail feature, about which I blogged a few months ago in my blog post Pull Quote Mystery. It’s rewarding and encouraging that Chris LoSacco from Arc90 indeed followed up to the promise he made in the comments section on CleverClogs, saying Joel would continue to improve the usability of Link Thumbnail: in the blog post Updated : New Link Thumbnail Goodness Chris announces that they now rely on the new thumbnail service WebSnapr instead of Alexa.
Note that there’s no download or web service to Joel’s project yet. I would appreciate it if he’d continue working on Search Clouds. I’d be delighted to provide extensive feedback if and when he needs it. Tell me, what techniques do you use to fine-tune your search results?
Technorati Tags: Search Clouds, Arc90, Joel Nagy, Chris LoSacco, Link Thumbnail, Fred Zelders, FeedFiles, RSS, RSS Technology, Search Engines
links for 2006-10-18
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Single-page aggregator by Rik Catlow of Apple news, software updates, rumors, reviews, resources and books. Lists 20 feeds from MacWorld News, macnn, Apple Hot News, Mac VersionTracker, MacUpdate, Apple OSX Downloads, MacWorldReview, etc. Amazing
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Clear instructions on how to add an image or banner to your RSS or atom feed. I tried it and it works fine. Jonathan says it allows you to track actual feed usage through your server stats, but I guess that’s for self-hosting bloggers only. I updated my f
OPML Reader: OPML Auto-Discovery Extension for Firefox
Sergio Longoni just informed me that it’s now safe to announce, review and discuss OPML Reader, an OPML Auto-discovery Extension for Firefox: this plug-in positions itself in your Firefox status bar as a tiny OPML icon. As soon as a user opens a website that links to an OPML file, the icon turns blue. Sites that do not link to an OPML file make the icon turn grey. Clicking on the OPML icon allows you to display the OPML file in Grazr or using the Optimal OPML browser. You can also opt to download the OPML file to your local hard drive.
I tested Sergio’s extension and confirm that it works fine on Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0. Note that as usual you need to restart Firefox before the extension works. For those who understand Italian, I suggest that you read Sergio’s own blog post OPML Reader per Firefox.
About Sergio Longoni
Sergio ‘Kromeboy’ is a prolific Italian geek blogger who recently provided Sterling Camden with constructive feedback on Sterling’s OPML blogroll widget for WordPress
(original conversation on James Corbett’s post OPML Autodiscovery), so it made perfect sense for me to connect to Sergio a few days ago. We exchanged quite a few messages over Skype and I’m proud that my bookmarklet inspired him to create this nifty extension. Some Firefox users happen to prefer extensions over bookmarklets so this is a perfect complement to my earlier efforts. I
know Sergio is eager to finetune his extension. Contact him directly by
looking for his ‘Contattami’ details on his blog KromeBlog if you’ve got some constructive feedback to share, or scroll down here to the comments section.
Making your site "OPML auto-discoverable"
It’s quite easy to add a link to an OPML file to your website, as long as you have access to your website’s template or source code. Go to the <head> section and insert the following (x)html tag:
<link rel="outline" type="text/x-opml" title="Title of Your OPML File"href="http://www.whatever.com/youropml.opml" />
so, in my case, my site’s source code contains this tag:
<link rel="outline" type="text/x-opml" title="Marjolein's Writings"href="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2417/Marjolein%27s+Writings.opml" />
(Split across lines because of column width)
Update 2006-10-27: By Randy Morin’s request, after a lively discussion over on Tom Raftery’s I.T. views blog between Randy and Tom Morris, I’ve changed the type attribute to "text/x+opml".
Update 2006-10-28: The debate on the proper content of the type attribute isn’t over yet. See James’ Holderness’ contribution over at Randy’s post Understanding Auto Discovery. Relying on Randy’s good judgment I changed all occurrences of type to "text/x-opml".
Suggestions for improvement
Web pages can link to multiple OPML files. At this moment the OPML Reader extension is only capable of displaying a single OPML file: it picks the last OPML file that was linked to from the <link> tag in the page header. In the case of CleverClogs this is my Marjolein’s Writings OPML, which is fine, but I can imagine other people usually list their OPML files in order of importance. So, until the extension features an OPML file selector (hint, Sergio!), I suggest that the extension selects the first one from the list.
Other OPML Viewers
New OPML viewers are bound to be launched anytime soon. In addition to the ones I mentioned (Grazr and Optimal), there’s also Bitty Browser, for example. I have used Bitty many times on CleverClogs in the past to display websites and RSS feeds in several of my blog posts. This week Scott Matthews, developer of Bitty, pointed out to me in a private email exchange that Bitty now also supports the display of OPML files. You can try Bitty Browser here: Marjolein’s Writings Bitty-wise
It would be nice if the OPML Reader extension would support Bitty Browser and any other OPML viewer that a Firefox user might prefer, for example by using the same mechanism that is used for connecting applications to file extensions: open this file using %1.
I hope Sergio’s efforts also bring us closer to a solution to a problem I brought up before: when clicking on any OPML hyperlink or icon, I would like to open that OPML file in my preferred browser. Please use the comments section to this post if you have ideas about this.
links for 2006-10-16
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Barnett points to the Live Search OPML Generator by Andy Edmonds: it’s possible to generate a hosted OPML file from the list of feeds that is generated with the “feed:” search operator. Compare TagJag, Kebberfegg and feedgit.
Skype RSS Reader: the Luobotou/anothR.com RSS Robot
Chinese programmers have made a Skype robot available that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds through the familiar Skype chat interface. Their website Skype RSS Robot (updated 2006-10-19) is available in Chinese and in English. Using the bot is incredibly simple: add the anothR.com bot to your contact list (the original screenname Luobotou2.0 was deprecated 2006-10-18, mh) and send it the urls to the feeds to which you want to subscribe.
Auto-discovery still loudly buzzing in my head, I checked if Skype RSS Robot could also detect any of my feeds by just providing it the url to CleverClogs:
I’ll post an update here to see if Skype RSS Robot indeed is able to notify me of the CleverClogs blog being updated with a blog post about ‘Skype RSS Robot’ (don’t you love those Escherian deadlocks). (Update 2006-10-19: the bot finally shows my feed items)
The Skype RSS Robot page also offers RSS publishers the option to generate a subscription chicklet, but I wasn’t able to get it to work with my FeedBurner feed. (Update 2006-10-18: the chicklet finally works for me: 
)
From the website design Skype RSS Robot seems very early stage ("BOLG" instead of "BLOG", and even that link leads nowhere), but the main functionality definitely is in place. (Update 2006-10-18: and another improvement here: there is now a Robot’s Blog, which even mentions that you can use the Skype bot to validate your feeds, Just dump them in the Skype chat window and if the bot reports that your subscription was successful, then the validation succeeded also)
UPDATE: 2006-10-17 Open-source evangelist Chris ‘Joe Factory’ Messina of Citizen Agency found my blog post and discovered which commands are supported by Skype RSS Robot. Most important feature that I had been wondering about is that you can schedule how often the robot delivers news items. Read Chris’ post on his blog "FactoryCity": Luobotou RSS Robot — feeds for Skype.