More on RSS Subscriber Tracking

Christopher Clemper: “why not use a simple name or e-Mail for user-tracking?”

The userID can be anything as long as it’s unique – an email address, an ICQ handle etc.

In the marketing world, however, a common design goal is to minimize the amount of data a user has to submit in order to receive your content. (I know, a lot of marketers abuse this, but that’s because they’re clueless. If marketers could reliably sell stuff to you without knowing your name, they’d do it. Hence the attraction of RSS.) Generating a userID from the server side if none is provided is a fallback option. One could easily imagine a form the posts a userID field as part of the feed subscription process. In that case, the server would just need to look up the ID to make sure it’s not already in use.

This is where part two of feed subscribing comes into play – the application/rss+xml MIME type. In the scenario above, the subscriber submits a form. If the form validates, what happens next? As it currently stands, they would be presented with an XML icon that they use to subscribe to the actual feed. Since that method is confusing to many users (e.g. my mom), I prefer that aggregators register with the client operating system/browser as the default handler for application/rss+xml. Then the publisher can just push out the feed with that MIME type (after first redirecting to the new, userID-aware URL) and the aggregator will catch it by default. QED. :)

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