Blogging Sueblimely

Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

After publicizing RSS Awareness Day, May 1st, I am a day late in taking part, although in some parts of the world it may still be yesterday. Not wanting to miss out on a chance of joining in with bloggers blogging in unity I had to get my own two cents worth in.

If your site provides a feed then you will be familiar with RSS. I know there are still many people who do not understand the concept nor use a feedreader. There are those who believe blogs are merely used as personal online diaries, which they would not read. They probably do not realize that many sites they visit regularly are in fact blogs. If your blog attracts returning readers who are not bloggers themselves, an occasional gentle reminder about subscribing would not go astray.

The term RSS has become a generic term to describe website feeds although RSS is only one of the two main methods of providing feeds. Atom is the other - the default feed for blogspot Blogger blogs is Atom. RSS is an acronym and therefore not pronounced phonetically as ‘ar-ss’.

Blogging platforms have feed capabilities built in to them and bloggers do not have to concern themselves with their own feeds unless they wish to take advantage of the extra information and statistics provided by services such as Feedburner. Feedburner creates its own feed for your blog and provides code for you to add to your theme or template to replace the default feed. You are provided with the code for an RSS button. A subscribe button in the sidebar highlights your feed as well as compensating for the lack of a subscribe icon in the address bars of some browsers. There are more subscribe options provided by clicking this button than those incorporated into browsers including subscribe by email.

The addition of a subscribe by email option is well worth having, to cater for those who prefer reading feeds that are delivered to their inbox. Your content is more likely to be read this way too, as it reaches those who do not visit their feedreader regularly.

I chose to incorporate a graphic I created into my feed code as you can see from my own feed button at the top of the first sidebar. I had no comments about this so it is probably very silly and I should remove it. If you want a snazzy feed button I talked about some free resources in my post Feed and Social Networking Buttons.

How you read your RSS feed is a matter of personal preference. I use the FeedDemon desktop reader which copes with my copious feeds and syncs with its corresponding web reader, Newgator Online. This enables me to have updated subscription lists on both my PC and Laptop. Google reader is also popular and allows you to publicly share your favorite posts. I periodically save my FeedDemon list to an opml file and then upload that to Google and other sites that allow my feeds to socially network with other feeds. (In the hope that my blog will also get some publicity.)

Do you have a favorite feedreader?

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