Ever wanted to track the changes to a webpage but found there was no easy way of doing it? The Hillingdon Council website makes this easy by generating an RSS feed for every page.
At the bottom of each page there’s a “Subscribe to this page” link and feed icon. The site also makes these feeds easy to find by putting them in autodiscovery tags, providing a consistent way to subscribe in each browser.
Using RSS as a mechanism for receiving page status updates makes much more sense than writing a custom subscription system and requiring user registration such as on Sutton Council’s website.
There’s plenty of scope for Hillingdon to produce more comprehensive specific feeds for other uses but this is a very useful feature in its own right. Combined with a feed-to-email link on every page to a service like Feed My Inbox it could see a lot of usage.
Let’s also remember that there’s more to life than RSS. Other feed formats and APIs are more appropriate for different types of data such as iCalendar for events.
Tags: APIs, feeds, Hillingdon, Hillingdon Council, RSS
21 July 2009 at 9:17 pm
Great idea! I am watching my local council, and I love the bits of technical advice you give to show what can be done.
I’d be very interested to see any examples of how local people, local sites re-use RSS feeds as I think this could be a driver for LAs to convince management.
I appreciate this is a grass roots campaign – does it have a Facebook page – might attract more ordinary citizens? I believe Liz Azyan maintains a list of councils on Facebook – the number is increasing fairly rapidly.
Finally, general council news is one obvious candidate for RSS but what else should councils be considering? Planning apps based on your postcode. What else is suited to this format and would citizens appreciate?