Recently...
Get the mrjerz.org newsletter!
Reno Baby! Forum
Reactionary Hurl
Short Book Reviews
Product Reviews
Misc: Where are my RSS feeds, Reno?
I think I remember when the City of Reno started offering email alerts of various city activities. The alerts range from street closures to Neighborhood Advisory Board meeting agendas to downtown events. It was a big step for the city to inform citizens on a huge range of things. I signed up immediately and chose the items I wanted to receive in my email.
Times have changed a bit. While never perfect, it was acceptable at the time to receive those emails just about daily. I suspect I’m not much different than a lot of you out there when I say that my email box is getting a bit overloaded. And believe me, I just don’t get all that many, but they’re still too many. I only have time for the most important emails in the inbox and the rest get relegated to the weekends. Plus, there isn’t much more annoying than an email containing a PDF file that could have been pasted into the email itself. As a result, I rarely even see what’s happening at my NAB meeting and I only know what streets are closed because if one I use is closed, I see that.
Reno needs to modernize just a bit more and start feeding the information through RSS. I spend a lot of time on the computer reading my RSS feeds. It’s where I get all the news and information that’s important to me. And an increasing number of you are doing the same thing (at least my visitor logs tell me that). Every morning I wake up and check the RSS feeds of my favorite sites. If the city’s alerts were sent that way, it’d be just like if I had picked up a newspaper put out by the city with all of their relevant information. The feeds could list events, meeting agendas, and street closures. They could even link right back to the cool little map they have showing road situations.
If the city doesn’t have any idea how to implement the change, there is a pretty cool local company that sort of specializes in this type of thing. Think of the press release — er — blog entry that announces that Reno has contracted with a local company to make all information put out by the city available through RSS. It’d be awesome. And it would make Reno an example for other cities across the state and region.
The point of RSS is to let people decide how they want their information. I don’t want to navigate myself to the city’s site to look for that map. I want to tell the internet one time that I’m interested and have the internet send me that map every time it is updated. The technology is here and it’s easy to use. Let’s embrace it.
Comments
I hate to show my ignorance but: what is the best way for me to educate myself on RSS and start using it? I did look it up on wikipedia to begin to familiarize myself. Thanks for any input you may have.
Kevin Reynen, Nov 3, 05:16 PM #:
Which of 12 horses clients have RSS feeds? I did a quick check of the clients they have listed on their site. None of them have RSS.
You can easily convert email to RSS with Drupal’s mailhandler module.
Twelve Horses clients with RSS:
- RSCVA (http://visitrenotahoe.com/datebook/)
- Las Vegas Monorail
(http://www.lvmonorail.com/media_center/pressreleases/)
- Twelve Horses (We are our best client – http://web.twelvehorses.com/new/)
Blogs Implemented by Twelve Horses with RSS:
- Aspect Software (http://aspect.12hna.com)
- NSBDC (http://blog.nsbdc.org/)
- Reno-Tahoe AMA (http://blog.renotahoeama.com)
- Truckee River Foundation (http://truckeeriverfoundation.org/news/)
Soon to be released:
- New Heavenly Ski Resort Web Design (Should be out later this Winter)
- Land Resource Investments Blog
- Gambler’s Bonus
- CoManCo Cingular Blog (John owns 5 Cingular stores in Reno)
- CETNV
The blogs were all done with Wordpress which like Drupal is easy to implement and has cool features/modules. Twelve Horses is a Internet Marketing company that understands the value of a) new awesome technologies like RSS and b) open source software.
David LaPlante, Nov 7, 01:20 AM #:
Wow Josh, 5:18 pm on a Friday…I was on a plane flying back from Vegas mooching free drink tickets off of Martin and was wondering who was turning the lights out at the Reno office!
You missed a bunch of customers that use RSS (like JP Morgan, Red Herring, Moto, Deloitte)...but that’s not the point.
Should the City bang their content in to RSS? Absolutely. And as 2008 rolls around, we — the collective citizenry — can get snippy about it. Meanwhile, it’s in the DNA of us “early adopters” to get snippy about it now. It’s how you push bleeding edge in to cutting edge into early adoption in to the norm and leave the laggards behind.
Is RSS’ifying (trademark here) the City a priority over fixing potholes and nailing residential speeders in 89509? Nope. Not even in my book…an RSS addict myself.
That Ryan’s A-list Reno community blogroll (which is an honor and a privilege to serve) is under 100 speaks volumes of the community.
As much as we bloggers and commenters here may think — or minimally want to believe — we’re still the minority. We’re really just about to move in to “early adopter” phase. That we not only know what RSS is — but expect it — is NOT the norm. This is a bitter pill to swallow and I myself have trouble with it ~23 hours of the day. (This just happens to be that 1 hour that I am not guilty of the same above sentiment!)
Reno is like most cities of our size and location (ie not close to LAX, SFO, ATL, BOS, JFK) in that we’re not quite there for having an aggressive online community. Our Craig’s List is slowly growing but even Salt Lake City and Las Vegas have us beat by miles in participative online communities. And yet neither Las Vegas or Salt Lake City have RSS in their sites either.
I think Ryan’s written about this at least once before. A great post if I recall and worth re-reading. (Ryan…comment with link please.)
Bottom line: The more citizens we encourage to jump in to the conversation and establish blogs of their own, the sooner Mr. Jerz’s desire will become a reality. When Ryan’s A-List tops 100 I bet the City is there (and not a moment too soon)!
Dave,
I see your point. I am not sure that Reno can’t or shouldn’t be able to lead the way, though. The idea came to me while looking at road closures and deleting a seemingly endless list of emails about meetings and such. I also thought that your presence in Reno should enable the transition.
The other post was here.
Kevin Reynen, Nov 7, 04:41 PM #:
If Twelve Houses really “understands the value of RSS”, where are the RSS feeds on the sites they already run at taxpayer expense?
http://www.cityofreno.com/cpanel/
http://www.ci.sparks.nv.us/cpanel/
This is why marketing to IT types is so difficult. Saying you are committed to RSS doesn’t make it true any more than saying your Cpanel product is a powerful, database driven content management system makes that true. Your products actually have to match the marketing or someone is going to call bullshit.
RSS isn’t just a tool for the early adopting bloggers. It’s a standard used by systems for information exchange. As far as standards go, RSS is as important as DNS, IP, HTTP, and HTML. It is difficult for anyone else to build on the information the city publishes if they don’t follow that standard.
Comparing RSS to potholes and speeders is just nonsense. Those solutions require physical resources. The cities of Reno and Sparks are already paying Twelve Horses to use their publishing system. Why isn’t RSS included in that product?
It wouldn’t have anything to do with locking these clients into a closed system so they have little choice but to continue paying Twelve Horses?
We (the taxpayers) need to hold our representatives accountable for what they spend on web development just like anything else. IMHO, Reno and Sparks are not getting what we are paying for.
Anyone know how much Twelve Horses is charging for these RSS-less sites? Any chance Twelve Horses will tell us without having to file a FOIA request?
Commenting is closed for this article.
