Week 10 RSS and Counters

Counters are when related to digital logic a mechanism that stores and displays the number of times that a particular event has occurred. This type of counter is an up-counter (increment counter) which increases in value. The rationale for the use of an increment counter in web design would be to actually log the number of times that a page is viewed. This could then be utilised as part of a marketing strategy or analysis of a web design project during research phase.

Two alternative methods of conducting web based analysis or "a traffic report of web pages or servers" is to use web server logfile analysis or through the use of page tagging . Web server logfiles are a method of storing information with regard to the pages that are visited and build data with regards to the popularity of website. Page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. These two methods both have advantages and disadvantages.

The Wikipedia RSS definition is listed through this link. Really Simple Syndication or RSS for short is a method of sharing or publishing frequently updated works. The type of sites that are utilising RSS are news, blogs, audio and video. It allows users to be informed of this information update without actually having to visit the site. Updates can be linked to a central site such as a blog that the blogger uses frequently. There is no limit to the number of RSS feeds that can be linked. This technology has provide time efficenies for users.

Google reader is a web based RSS feed reader. It works by accessing the URL of a particular site and the RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds all within Google reader.