RSS feeds are brilliant. They allow you to keep up to date with websites and blogs without visiting the website or blog.
RSS feeds are bad. They allow you to keep up to date with websites and blogs without visiting the website or blog.
Both of these mutually exclusive statements are correct for me. They allow me to get my regular dose of posts from blogs with my emails. The bad part is, as I’m very bad at leaving comments, I don’t then visit the blog itself.
- I must make the effort to visit and comment on other blogs, not just read the feeds.
- I must make the effort to return the compliment, by visiting and commenting on the blog of anyone who visits and comments on mine.
If my reasons haven’t put you off, here is my feed:
Posts 
I subscribe to you in bloglines, by reader not email. So that’s why I always show up when you post. I usually click over to the blog if I want to either comment or read the comments which means I click over 90 % of the time. I like people with mybloglog (the idea came from you to join) so I can leave a trail if not a comment and same with those who visit me.
One thing you can do to help prevent people from just living off your RSS feeds is to make the feed’s only show a small summary of each of your blog posts, rather than the whole content of each of them.
Hi jmb,
Yes, I must take a leaf out of your book and use the posts in the feed as a trigger to visit the blog and comment.
I do like both MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog for the widgets that show who has visited. I found your blog after I had been a member of mybloglog for a couple of days, it was the westie that did it. In the first days it was easier, I had less blogs that I read and used to visit to read them.
Regards,
Ian
Hi James,
Thanks for the thought. I know you could use partial feeds instead of full feed to force people to visit to get the full post. Personally, I hate partial feeds, they serve a purpose to let you know there is a new post, but don’t contain enough of the post to be interesting. I tend to unsubscribe to partial feeds.
I notice you use full feeds, did you have any thoughts about using partial feeds yourself?
Regards,
Ian
Ian,
I’ve not really had any plan’s to use partial feed’s myself. Although it might be something for me to consider in the future if i, say, plonk revenue generating ad’s on my website.
Regards,
James