Improving Spartan Daily

There has been a lot of talk about how to improve the online presence of The Spartan Daily such as here on Invisible Inkling. From my perspective, the easiest way to do that is to concentrate less on the web page and more on making the RSS feed useful. It’s great that the Spartan Daily has an RSS feed, but the full article is not included in the feed. In order to view the article, you have to click a link to the Spartan Daily website and read it from there. That defeats the purpose of using an application like Google Reader, and it makes me not want to read the feed at all.

I also don’t like the layout of the Spartan Daily webpage. Don’t get me wrong, it is impressive considering it was probably designed by some very hard working people at SJSU, but it just doesn’t fit the way I’m used to having content delivered to me. It looks like an old school static page. I think it would be better and simpler if the stories were just published on a Wordpress page. That would also allow articles to be tagged with information like the author, or the type of article. Ultimately, small changes like these could make the Spartan Daily more accessible and give more power to the readers.