A month ago I leveled a scathing critique of the Department of Homeland Security’s new Web site, citing among other things the lack of redirected URLs resulting in 404 errors and the lack of RSS feeds. DHS almost immediately reacted to the former and put up redirects for the most frequently used areas of the site. And at some point they also very quietly rolled out some RSS feeds.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a content distribution format which allows users to subscribe to Web sites and be notified directly on their desktops when a site has updated content, and in many cases, to read the updated content without opening a Web browser. Most major news outlets and many other Web sites publish RSS feeds with their content.

Popular RSS readers include Google Desktop for Windows, NetNewsWire for Macintosh and Thunderbird for all three major platforms. Web browsers Safari and Firefox, as well as the newest version of Internet Explorer, also include RSS readers, showing a special icon when RSS feeds are available.

I discovered the feeds quite by accident, since there’s no indication from the DHS home page that feeds are available. There is no link to a directory of RSS feeds, and from the homepage there is no feed icon in the browser toolbar. However, I noticed the feed icon tonight when looking for something else on the DHS web site. It seems to appear only on a few parts of the site, rather than sitewide, so it’s not obvious to the casual observer that there are any feeds available.

The four RSS feeds now available from DHS are: Homeland Security Press Room, Homeland Security Press Releases (what’s the difference?), Homeland Security Speeches and Homeland Security Testimony.

It’s a good start, though it doesn’t go far enough. Many parts of the site with regularly updated information don’t have corresponding RSS feeds, such as OIG management reports.

Web site content management systems available for the last several years allow for separate RSS feeds for every section of a Web site, along with an integrated RSS feed which publishes every update made anywhere on the site. Come on, DHS webmaster, I know you can do better. Let’s have more feeds!