RSS: Eat your own blog/site feed (Part III)
Continued from part II.
Either if you are a Pro or a Newbie blogger you should subscribe to your own website’s RSS feed. What you see in your web page, is usually not the exact replica on what other people see if they are subscribed in your RSS feed. Here are a list of what I’ve observed in some sites and blogs since using a feed reader for almost a year.
Why is it necessary to subscribe to your own blog or website?
- Image wraps. The text wraps on the image perfectly on the site itself, but when viewed on a feed reader, the text has an uneven flow on the side of the image. There are usually two ways to use IMG (image) wrapping; (1) using a CSS and CLASS to define alignment, and (2) directly inserting the ALIGN tag on the IMG itself. If you use the CSS method, the output on the feed reader is usually messed up because the reader doesn’t call the external CSS of your site. If you directly place the ALIGN tag on the IMG, this will result in a favorable output. I’ve seen a lot of feeds from popular websites that have a messed feed output.
- Messed up script codes. I’ve seen this a couple of times. There’s that time when a blog owner try to liven up his/her feeds by adding a little more info at the end of the feed posts. So what does he/she do? Add scripts and additional codes at the footer of the feed. And sometimes, just sometimes, the code spreads out like an error message, for days. It’s a common rule for web developers that when you are coding for a website, you usually check the output in Internet Explorer and Firefox (which has the same output as the rest of the other browsers. Opera, Safari). It must look good in both browsers. So if you are adding codes and scripts on your site feed output, remember to check them in a feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines).
- Hotlink protected image. I fell for this mistake twice, the first time I didn’t realize the problem. If you use a CPanel on your web host, there’s that feature to have your images protected from hotlinks. Generally if you protect, let’s say all JPG images, when another person directly link to that image in your host, it will not show up on his/her end. The protected image format will only show up on the websites you “allowed” it. Usually the only allowed site is your domain, placing any other domain on the “allowed” list will let them steal your bandwidth. There are mixed reactions regarding this problem. One, is that, when you hotlink protect your images and your domain is the only thing in your “allowed” websites, then the image will not show up on a feed reader. A solution to this problem is to add the reader in question to your allowed domains, like adding Google Reader. But what if I’m using a different feed reader? You might as well add that one, and add all the other feed readers on the list. There are still some sites on my feed reader that falls to this problem. I have two options usually for this; (1) if I find the article/post interesting, I click the link to go to the site itself to view the image, and (2) if this goes on, like for days or weeks, I hit the unsubscribe button.
- More tag. The more tag lets you break your post if it is too long. The broken part is usually hidden unless the viewer click on the post tile (direct post link) or click the “read more” link. In blogging etiquette, the use of more tag is essential if you have a post that is too long. Bloggers often use this for many reasons.
- For directing page views and traffic to their sites. If I’m reading a good article on my feed reader and I hit the “more” link to continue reading, I usually end up on the site itself. Bloggers use this to gain page views for their site, since a user visiting the site itself counts more than someone who is reading its contents in a feed reader.
- Giving a slice before showing the whole cake. Usually a good introduction and a single photo is enough to tempt the reader to click the “more” link. Bloggers, write a short intro about the topic of the post, and sometimes a short paragraph detailing the rest of the article. This is a good practice because it doesn’t flood the reader with too much info. The reader has a choice to continue reading (click the read more) if he/she finds it interesting or just leave the post alone. Since it’s just a summary, he/she didn’t waste a couple of minutes more. I use this technique in my babes portal category. Two advantages are: (1) less bandwidth consumption since the rest of the photos doesn’t load unless the reader is interested to continue reading the whole post, and (2) the page load is quicker.
Like the hotlink problem, I usually unsubscribe from blogs that uses this too much. It’s too much of a hassle to go out of the feed reader to visit the site itself. And that’s the reason why we use feed readers right? To let the contents of the site visit us, not the other way around.
- Content cutting. In Wordpress, and some other blogs (?), there is an option to automatically cut your post after a certain number of words to give a brief summary. This is good, but quite irritating and I’ve unsubscribe to more than a dozen of blogs because of this reason alone. Not unless you count your words every time you create a new post, you wouldn’t know in what part the cut will happen. The end result? The reader is confused because he couldn’t read the rest of the post’s introduction. Don’t use this please, just use the “read more” function.
Now you might be wondering why I didn’t use the “more” feature on this long post. I could have, but even if the reader of this post is interested of not. I just don’t want to interrupt his/her reading, I don’t want that to happen to me. I’m guessing after the first two of the list above the reader, if not interested, could have skipped this post. But since you’ve already reading this part of the post, then that means you are one of the interested readers.
That’s another reason why I always use lists (bullets) in my posts. It’s easier to read and easier to skip the post if the reader is not interested.
Remember, the reason why you should subscribe to your own feed is to see what the others are seeing. So if there is a problem in the feed, you can correct it quickly. It had saved me during the hotlink problem I encountered. When I read the feed of my own blog, the images where not showing up, but when I look at the website the images are just fine.
My tip: Don’t do to your feed what you don’t want to see in someone else’s.
