Brent Simmons recently wrote about “Your name matters“:
Take a look at your weblog. How easy is it to find your name?
It’s hard in a surprising number of weblogs. But I’m not going to link to your weblog unless I can find your name.
I’m going to take his question one step further. How easy is it to find your name in your RSS (or Atom) feed? Most of the news I read comes from skimming posts in Google Reader’s ‘All Items’ view. That allows me to quickly go through new posts that I haven’t seen yet. When looking at a post my main hint for where it came from is the feed title, and to a lesser degree the post title.
I didn’t realize how important that was until I saw someone do a really bad job of it. Our local school district, www.canyonsdistrict.org, provides feeds for news items posted to their site. Which is great. But the title for the feed is useless: General News. Not ‘Canyon District General News’, just ‘General News’. When skimming through new items in Google Reader ‘General News’ provides me with zero details on what site the item is from.
Your name should be easy to find and obvious on your site and in your feed.