RSS At Work

The engineers at work are starting to find reasons to have an news feed aggregator running on their machines at work, mostly so they can keep track of changes being made to the wiki, but it provides a convenient mechanism to push content out to the entire team without being too intrusive.  For some reason RSS feeds seem to be able to handle more information flowing past before it all becomes to much to sort through.  As we get more of the engineers with RSS aggregators running, there’s a much lower barrier to entry for new information feeds and a much higher pay-off for developing them.  For instance, when I get a few free moments I’d like to set up an RSS feed for CVS commits (this is harder than it seems since somehow we wound up using CVSNT instead of just putting the CVS repository on one of our Solaris boxes).  If I’m the only one subscribing to that feed it’s probably not worth setting up, but if half the engineering team is subscribed then it can really start to increase the chances of stupid mistakes or missed scenarios being picked up.

An RSS feed for bugzilla would be useful as well as would a feed from our custom built feature manager.  The latest build results would be much better delivered via RSS instead of email too, might have to go searching for a CruiseControl reporter that can do that.

Once you have all those RSS feeds, you should be able to build a project dashboard much easier as well as providing the ability for engineers to customize it just by syndicating the RSS feeds – a pretty straight-forward XSLT should be able to do it in fact.  The biggest problem is that there’s so many different formats for feeds to use but since it’s all internal you could probably standardize on one or two pretty easily.

Shame we out-sourced our support tracking system to an external host or we could have built an RSS feed into that as well and made it easier to pick up on new support issues that get assigned to me.

I’m not sure what happened but somewhere along the way, email lost it’s ability to effectively manage information and RSS seems to be rapidly filling that void.  There’s still a lot of use for email but it’s no longer my preferred notification mechanism anymore.  I think I’ll have to adapt Scoble’s rule of firing any marketing team that puts up a website without RSS – anyone who releases a product that needs to provide notifications or regular updates and doesn’t provide an RSS feed should be fired.