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Really simple?

Thanks to lo-fi librarian for discovering Parliament’s secret RSS feeds. But, as she points out, subscribing to these is far from simple:

1) Nowhere are the feeds advertised. You first need to find a page that offers the option to “Subscribe to Email Alerts for this page”, eg Public Bills before Parliament.

2) On the sign up page, check the updates to which you wish to subscribe.

3) I can’t recall if this lands you on your User Profile page. If not, once you start receiving emails (and they will come thick and fast), access your User Profile Page from the link in the email and click the orange feed icon to access your personalised feed.

4) Assuming you don’t want your email inbox clogged up, at the bottom of the User Profile page click the option “Do not send updates by e-mail. I want to receive updates only through my personalized RSS feed” and save.

You are now the proud subscriber to a personalised UK Parliament RSS feed.

I suspect I’m not alone in thinking this a daft way to go about things. How about, instead, they advertise their feeds, offering a feed for each of the updates and enabling “auto-discovery” of the feeds on the appropriate pages. Then users could subscribe to whichever feeds they choose in the manner to which they are accustomed without all that faffing about.

A further disappointment is that the feed items include the update information only in the body of the feed; the titles and links are to the (updated) page on the Parliament site; so all headlines for each type of alert have the same uninformative title and link to the same page; you do need to read the full feed content to benefit.

Update: Just discovered you can access the full, unfiltered feed without signing up: here it is . But how useful is this?

Nick Holmes

8 thoughts on “Really simple?”

  1. Despite jumping through all the hoops, they still won’t let me actually subscribe to the damn feed. Keep getting error messages along the lines of ‘no feed, check url and try again!’.

    Most frustrating as the emails are multiplying like bunnies.

  2. As someone that has been subscribed to an Ofcom rss feed for the best part of 2 years that they still haven’t acknowledged / officially launched anywhere on their site this sadly doesn’t come as a surprise. Think I’ll stick with collection of feeds I have via theyworkforyou for this info for the time being.

  3. Thanks for the link to the unfiltered feed. Not brilliantly useful, but better than the tons of emails I would otherwise have to put up with. Apparently I can’t add the filtered feeds to bloglines – or google reader – as there is no feed recognised! Useless!
    I am also subscribed to feeds from the DCA, DCMS etc. Not well publicised feeds, but at least easy to find if you are looking. Not so the Ofcom feed – which I have now found (thanks Scott!).

  5. Ahh thankyou for the unfiltered feed link.

    I’ve subscribed to all the emails anyway, so having the feeds instead will be much nicer. I’m a compulsive email checker, and must check as soon as a new message arrives, so having these emails out of my box will be much better for me.

  6. What about trying to use Google to find these hidden feeds on government sites? I’m no expert on search queries, but I tried:

    allinurl: rss OR feed site:*.parliament.uk

    and got some results. Any thoughts on the usefulness of this approach for other government sites? Any other suggestions for the search terms?

  7. Jordan

    I have checked out the numerous other feeds on parliament.uk. These seem to be sample feeds from US Gov sites from the GovDelivery system eg Saint Paul MN (Minnesota). To quote:

    GovDelivery is the world’s leading provider of government-to-citizen e-mail and wireless communication solutions designed specifically for the public sector and is used by organisations worldwide, including the U.K. Parliament, Norwich City Council, U.S. Departments of Labor, State, Agriculture, and Commerce, Washington D.C., California Department of Insurance, Oregon Department of Human Services, Macomb County (MI), City
    of St. Paul (MN), and many more.

    GovDelivery Public RSS Feeds enable you to offer citizens a broader range of information for subscription than typical RSS feeds and reach subscribers even when there are no changes to the website. … The RSS feed will contain the same content as the e-mail updates you send on a given topic.

    See http://www.govdelivery.co.uk

    Nick

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