2 October 2008

Khoi Vinh relaunched his website on ExpressionEngine and in so doing his RSS feed went a little nutso. He probably got more flack for it than deserved, and then he wrote a followup to the comments regarding the feed. Read this part:

It’s embarrassing, really, how badly I underestimated how important the RSS feed for this site had become in the many intervening years since I first set it up. It’s funny, too: countless hours were spent on tidying up all of the many, many Web pages that make up this site, and yet it’s really the nearly invisible — and in many respects, design-free — RSS feed that is the most critical lifeline for readers.

and this:

… the feed is really a tool for readers …

What’s curious about this is that countless hours were spent laboring over the design of his website for his readers, and here are his readers (myself included, admittedly), and even Khoi himself, suggesting that his readership might not even be reading it in that format. So why bother?

The feed reader is sure dang useful — but what does this say about the design of our websites? Does the design even matter? I’d like to say of course it does. And it was likely the design of Subtraction that lured me in years ago and I first began reading Khoi’s site. 

Does content really so distinguishably reign over design? Should it? Jason Santa Maria’s recent approach seems a good solution. Articles on his new website are so individually designed or art directed that one can hardly get away with simply reading from the feed. I find myself rather compelled to click through to his website, or else I’ll be missing out on the fullness of the reading experience.

(I am obviously avoiding the conversation about the design of RSS feeds — without which I wouldn’t be writing any of this — but that particular seems aside the issue which stands out to me in Khoi’s latest article.)