Somebody wrote to me:
"Blog looks great, but don't you offer an RSS feed? I couldn't find it from top to bottom. So many these days use that to read blogs through Google Reader (be it on computers or as in my case I read it on my mobile while I commute on a bus every day) :)"
I thought RSS was on by default. I don't know the first thing about it. What do I do?
I often revise posts several times. Will RSS readers get a new version every time?
I think I looked at RSS for three minutes, three years ago, and I couldn't see the point. What's it good for?
12 comments:
RSS has come a long way in being adopted in 3 years. I hear new Outlook version is including it now, I can imagine it will only spread even more wildly.
Darren at ProBlogger.net is quite an authority, his RSS subscriber list alone is over 30k I believe. He has some basic info on why use RSS for blogs here:
http://www.problogger.net/what-is-rss
Thanks!
Google has chosen to use Atom instead of RSS as Blogger's syndication format. Atom is newer and offers the same functionality as RSS. Most feed readers understand both.
The confusion with the person who wrote to you may be due to the fact that the link to the feed is not prominently visible. For the record, the URL is:
http://eolake.blogspot.com/atom.xml
The Safari address field shows an "RSS" icon to indicate the availability of a feed. It does that here too even though, technically, your blog is not available in RSS format.
"What's it good for?"
Using it you don't have to go check people's web sites to see if there's something new to read. Instead, you tell your Mac (or Unix box, or PeeCee) which RSS/Atom feeds to monitor and it will then report what's new and present it all in a digested format.
I follow about 40 blogs/news sources. Thanks to RSS/Atom this only takes about 10 minutes of my day.
For the reader I use Vienna on the Mac and recommend it highly. It's free.
Ah, there are very few blogs I'm interested in checking often, that may explain something.
How do I turn on RSS?
Eolake,
It's already on. I use my RSS reader to keep an eye on your blog.
Have the guy manually add a feed that points to this link: 'http://eolake.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss'
Hey, I read your blog through RSS _only_! ;-)
Aha, it seems Blogger blogs advertise Atom (in the header link tag) but nowadays an RSS feed is silently generated too.
Even this short form seems to work:
http://eolake.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Using IE and Firefox I have you in my RSS list. So you've already turned it on. Sweet!
Kool, OK.
But how do people find it then, when looking at the blog? Isn't there anything I can turn on which makes a link appear pointing to RSS?
Oh no, the plot thickens still. It appears that the main blog page does indeed advertise both atom and xml. It has these two lines:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" ...
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" ...
However, the comment page (i.e. this page) only has the former. This is what got me confused. So, both formats are supported and advertised.
"But how do people find it then, when looking at the blog?"
I think the idea is that these be detected automatically by the client software. That's what those "link rel=alternate" lines are for.
You don't necessarily need to do anything. Of course, you could link to the URL(s) in your welcome note.
In Firefox, simply look for the RSS feed icon in the location bar and click on it.
I don't know to what extent you control the contents (appearance, layout) of your blog page, but the basic idea is to simply add an RSS logo (http://feedicons.com/) to your page, and make it point (hyperlink) to http://eolake.blogspot.com/rss.xml.
Voilà!
If I may make a recommendation, it would be simply to add an RSS button prominently visible on your blog. It's been suggested in comments above I believe. But typically it's what people look for to subscribe (sometimes before even reading your blog, as they'd rather read it on their time during their feed reader as was my case).
Sites like this have plenty of icons to use: http://www.feedicons.com/
In addition, I could recommend "burning" your rss feed through a service such as http://FeedBurner.com - this one was bought by Google recently. It allows you to wrap your rss feed through feedburner, thereby exposing a new URL for people to subscribe to. But the added advantage is you can track how many subscribers you have, and also offer other services such as email subscriptions automatically. Some people prefer to get updates via email, FeedBurner is pretty good and is used quite widely in the blogosphere as one of the norms these days.
Best Regards,
Ari S.
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