I never really believed in using or providing RSS/Atom feeds to my regular readers because I feel that it’s not healthy for my blog traffic. I used to think that:
- Using RSS feeds could reduce pageviews of your blog.
- RSS readers are sometimes delayed and not updated. This could give an impression that your blog has not been updated when in fact you have just done so.
- RSS feeds do not provide you with any form of revenue, unless you’re into AdSense for feeds or something similar.
- Not too many people know RSS, much more use it.
- Providing feeds allow other unscrupulous bloggers to scrape your site easily. Seen a couple of them scraping AdSense-related posts from my blog before.
- Feeds do not show other cosmetic changes you make on your blog. It defeats the whole blogging experiencing without the eye-candy part.
I have a lot of other reasons before about not using RSS or Atom feeds. One of them was actually adapting to a new blog reading habit.
This perception has been reversed only recently. I realized that I myself have been having a hard time tracking all the blogs I read and using feed readers such as FeedDemon and Newsgator/Google Reader has significantly help me read more or cover more blogs.
Ever since, I’ve encouraged other people to use feed readers as well. Mine’s FeedDemon for my desktop and Newsgator/Google reader for web. What’s yours?
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I actually use the one that came with Google Desktop. Not a very feature rich RSS reader but I like to avoid clutter and Google Desktop had most of the things I needed.
I just recently switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, and I’m kind of regretting it now. Google Reader is still really rough around the edges, doesn’t have a “Mark All as Read” function, and the JS-driven animated interface rubs me the wrong way. Still, I like the feed organization structure, so I’m trying to make tiis with it while they improve.
I used to be like you, I didn’t like RSS too much, and wanted to encourage people to come to my blog to read it. Now however, after realizing like you, I don’t have time to follow each of the blogs I like, I use readers. I even made my WP theme to incorporate the RSS button right at the top, up front, and in each article, showing the comment feed too. Now I use bloglines.
Me, too. I used to visit each and every blog. Then it came to a point that reading more than 20 blogs a day just won’t cut it. I use netvibes for web and I’m playing with the one that’s integrated with Flock.
I love feeds. I’ve been reading strictly from feeds for such a long time now. I only visit the pages that have content I want to see. I don’t mind seeing ads on them either.
It is also great to make your data portable to other data sites. There are tons of search engines out there that especialize on feeds and only feeds. Plus there are feeds for almost every site imaginable out there, from blogs to P2P.
Similarly with vern; i love rss feeds. 80% of the time i’m using rss reader(s) in reading my favorite contents (including yugatech).
These are the Readers i’m using. i used to experiment and tried all of them, to find the best reader for me in the given situation and requirements.
1. Google Reader - very simple UI and handy for me while carrying in one hand my 2 months son
2. NetVibes - yet another cool AJAX apps - what i love in Netvibes compare to other RSS readers is I can listen directly to podcast feeds. It got also clean interface similar to Google Personalized and better preview like Start.
3. MS Start Page - huh! this is one of the few MS products i use and can recommend (another one is the MS Antispyware).
3. Google Personalized - well, its Google, yeah!
4. Search Fox - an intelligent news reader! it tries to “learn” your favorite topics.
I got also some rss feeds in my.yahoo.com; but not updated and complete compare to the 4 above.
Oh by the way, for those webpages without an existing syndication format you can use FeedTier to create one.
I hope I contribute something here…
I use a Mozilla Firefox extension called Sage:
http://sage.mozdev.org/
It’s light on features but it works well.
I use Bloglines. And as for protecting your content, It’s good to generate article summaries instead of the whole thing.
RSS does drive traffic to your site, too, if used well.
I find Google Reader to be erratic sometimes. Most of the time, I rely on FeedDemon when reading at home and Newsgator when on the move.
Hi Jeff,
Yes, I have Sage installed in my FireFox as well.
I’m using Thunderbird (as client-side RSS aggregator), but it can only read RSS feeds - no Atom. #8 is right, I think it’s better to generate just the summaries instead.
Depending on my mood: Bloglines, Newsgator, or Opera.
Thank God for OPML.