Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Oh well, I guess the web was bad and didn't deserve a cool modern web site from Canada.com like I asked for nicely :-) ! I bet this wasn't a technical decision; I bet not offering RSS feeds falls out from not wanting to (or being afraid to) move from their really bad, not-modern content management system to a modern web infrastructure (like Drupal, Plone, Joomla or h*ck even WordPress or Movable Type could have been used if all they wanted to add was blogs).

To any other organization contemplating such a move: it's really easy, you don't have to junk your old system. Just add blogging, videoblogging and podcasting on new servers running more modern systems as a complement to your existing web presence on your old servers.

I hope we hear from the techies on this one but I doubt it since they don't use RSS and their stuff disappears behind a paywall so even if they do, it probably won't show up on Google!

From Canada.com Redesigns Without RSS Feeds | Darren Barefoot.:

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Canada.com recently launched a long-overdue redesign of their website. I'll let you decide what you think on your own, but I find it way too busy, deeply unusable and just plain ugly. As somebody (I think it was on here, but I can't find it now) recently remarked, they went from looking like an early-nineties website to a late-nineties one.

One particularly laughable navigation element is the 'share it' section. This teases with the prospect of citizen journalism and reader engagement, but turns out to be the bucket for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. What do obituaries (new user-generated content, every day!), personals and e-cards (speaking of the nineties) have in common? They do have a discussion group, but they managed to select the ugliest, least user-friendly forum software I've seen in years.

What's the worst offense (aside from the subscription walled gardens)? No RSS feeds. C'mon, it's nearly 2006. Nearly every media outlet in the world offers RSS feeds. CanWest is among the largest media conglomerates in Canada. What possible reason could they have for not implementing them?

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All I want for Christmas from Canada.com is: full text RSS, comments and clean URLs i.e. Web 2.0 :-) !

From What's new at Canada.com?.:

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Well, we couldn't leave "good enough" alone. So we're revamping our 10 metro newspaper sites and the National Post website, to make them even better for you! There will be a new look, designed to make getting around and finding what you need easier than ever.

The quality of our content will not change, but there will be more of it, including more news, more video, and more discussion groups. We're even adding new features!

Coming soon... a better user experience. Stay tuned for your local newspaper's new website!

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