RSS driven Internet Site: Part One

First, best practices show that an internet effort requires more than a web site. While it use to be that you also need email alerts or newsletters, you now also need to provide users with RSS feeds. Taking that a step further, I believe that the content of your RSS feeds is also the content for your email. Therefore, your RSS feeds become the "backbone" storage for your content.

Second, not all content fits in RSS. For example, you could have a map of North America and clicking on a country retrieved a document about that country. This would require several pages of HTML (or tricky JavaScript or Flash coding). This type of document, that I'll call a hyper document, is not meant for RSS.

Third, just because content is stored in an XML file does not mean that the web page has to be generated dynamically. Static web pages provide faster response to users' clicks and use 90% less server resources. So it is beneficial to have the most frequently requested pages reside on the web server as static HTML pages which are created from RSS feeds, templates and other content.

So this is what I mean by an RSS driven Internet Site.