- Image by GeekMom Heather via Flickr
Let’s say you have a job where you are required to make 100% sure that none of our 50 states have made a disaster declaration… everyday. And by required, I mean the Federal Audit type of required. You have to prove that you are taking every measure to ensure that you know when a State Governor declares a disaster.
Easy right, just hop on over to each state’s official website one time, pick up their RSS feed and throw it in your Google Reader. Then, in Google Reader, search on the term “Disaster Declaration” or any term for that matter, check the results everyday, and your life is cake.
That’s what I thought…
Now let’s say that 11 of our 50 states, and the District of Columbia, don’t have actual RSS feeds on their websites. WTF? 20% of this nation’s states are RSS incapable on their official sites… No worries though, right? Plan B means that I can create a feed from any website. Yes, however, my new scraped RSS feed only picks up the headlines from the page it’s scraping. That means my Google Reader can only sift through the headlines of each entry from those 12 sources to look for my keyword search.
Now when audit time rolls around, I can’t say that I have 100% assurance that I’m catching all disaster declarations because there isn’t an across the board standard for posting disaster declarations on state websites. Each state can do it their own way, like bury the disaster declaration into a generic Executive Order Headline.
extra bonus When a new regime takes office, they may change the URL or sub-domain for the Governor. That means you have to stay on your toes for changes because you could stop receiving information from a site without being aware of it. Easy to recognize if you’re only checking that one state. Not so easy to pick up on if you have 50 state sites mixed with other state information sources in your feed reader.
After spending a considerable amount of time on this problem, the result is that you have to manually click and surf through 50 websites everyday to make 100% sure that a disaster has not been declared that day in any state. The future is now.
RSS Shunners
The idea behind RSS has been around since 1995, yet the following states have not found an easy way to incorporate it into their official websites. In case you weren’t aware, here is the list of the states taking the simple out of Really Simple Syndication:
Arizona RSS feed of PDF files = Not reader friendly
Connecticut
Kansas E-mail updates
Maryland Subscribe link leads to a Contact Form
Mississippi RSS icon with no link
Montana
New Hampshire
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Washington RSS feed of headlines only = Not reader friendly
Wisconsin E-mail updates
[Disclaimer Alert: The thoughts above are my own, and do not represent the thoughts of anybody else... including my employer]
