The subject for our three week tuneup at dotherightthing.com are RSS feeds. Or Atom feeds, to be precise, since we wanted to go the real standards route.

What feeds?

Feeds (often known as RSS feeds or syndication feeds) are XML-based documents that you read by a so-called feed reader. The feed reader can be built in your web browser (which is the case with e.g. Firefox 2), online (such as Newsgator), or a specific reader application (such as NetNewsWire for Mac or Mozilla Thunderbird). In any case, the idea behind feeds is that you don’t have to keep track of the new content on a site yourself, you let the feed reader do it for you. For this purpose, we just published a wide menu of different feeds to whet the appetite of our users.

The main feed

Our main feed can be accessed through http://feeds.dotherightthing.com/dtrt . The feed will show a bunch of popular recent stories, just like the front page does. This feed is probably the best fit for normal users interested in keeping track of what’s happening at dotherightthing.com.

Recent feed

The best choice for the brave souls who want to explore all the new exciting stuff going on on the site is the Recent Stories feed. The feed can be found at http://feeds.dotherightthing.com/dtrt_recent and will include each and every new story posted on dotherightthing.com. But don’t blink, since the feed will update on a fast pace.

Personalized feed

The feeds we’re maybe the most proud of are the personalized feeds. Personalized feeds show all the comments made on your entries or entries that you commented on yourself. This is a great way to follow all the discussions in which you’re participating. You can subscribe to your personalized feed by browsing to your own profile page (click “Your Profile” in the upper right corner of a dotherightthing.com page when you’re logged in) and clicking the feed link. The address of a personalized feed is the url of the profile page plus /personalized_feed.atom (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/users/ryan/personalized_feed.atom ).

Company feeds

Whether you’re a company representative or just interested in a particular company, we have a feed for you! Just add .atom to the url of a company (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/companies/starbucks.atom ), and you will get the feed for the latest entries for that company. There is also a link to the company feed on each individual company page.

User feeds

Found a person that is unable to submit other than perfectly rounded stories and comments? Why not subscribe to her submissions. Browse to her profile page and click the feed link, or just add .atom to the user profile page url (e.g. http://dotherightthing.com/users/ryan.atom ).