Stay Informed: Learn About RSS Feeds

One of the smartest things a new blogger can do, other than writing their own content, is to keep track of what others are doing. This is especially true if you are running a news focused blog, or are trying to compete with another blogger. Many of you probably understand that there are RSS feeds, and that you can subscribe to them, but do you know how or why?

In talking to a client of mine, I was asked, “why do I want to subscribe, rather than just bookmark and check back in?”

The simple answer to this is: so new content gets pushed to you. If you don’t want to miss potentially important content, and want to receive it in a reasonably timely fashion, making sure to subscribe to various RSS feeds, is like buying into your own, personalized newspaper consisting of all your favorite blogs. This will allow you to be more efficient, and if you turn that time savings into writing time, you’ll produce more content.

If you are still bookmarking sites, and visiting them each day, or getting their content in your e-mail inbox. How does that help you? Why are you still doing that when we have RSS subscriptions now that are near instant in pushing content out to you, easy to manage, and powerful, when you dive deep into controlling them.

Currently, I use Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice. It is a hosted, web-based service that makes subscribing, managing subscriptions and reading my subscriptions from any computer connected to the Internet very easy. I know the more popular choice is Google Reader, another hosted service, but I’ve never been completely happy with their user interface (probably because I used Bloglines first and have become accustomed to how it works).

There are also hundreds of desktop clients that you can install on your computer, no matter the operating system you use, and thus allow you to download and read your content when not connected to the Internet, or notify you when you have new content to read in a more “attention grabbing” way than an online RSS reader can do.

If you are looking for more information on the best available options, LifeHacker did a roundup a while back with some great choices.

Start using an RSS reader, keep yourself organized and informed, and you might just be more productive on your blog, but don’t blame me if you start subscribing to everything under the sun, and it consumes your whole day. RSS subscription overload can be a common problem as well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Help Us Name our Our RSS Subscription Link

Taking the cue from a post on Copyblogger a while back, I now wonder what we should name our RSS subscription link in our site redesign. On the Blog Herald, Lorelle reinforces the view that using the term “subscribe” might turn away people.

True–”subscriptions” usually cost money. And folks are attracted to free stuff. While we do have a premium subscription site, the Hive, the main Performancing.com site content continues to be free, whether you read on-site, via email or your RSS reader.

So saying “Subscribe to Performancing” might come across incorrectly as Perf being a pay site.

Lorelle suggests you use clever ways to name your subscription links. For instance, a blog about cats can say “Track this cat,” and a blog about health or medicine can say “Get a daily dose …” But generic ones will work, too.

For Performancing.com, we need a catchy line for our RSS subscription link. If you can give us good suggestions, we will give the top choice a free year’s pro pMetrics subscription and a free six month membership to the Hive.

What do you think we should put up there on the RSS link?

50 Tips To Gain RSS Subscribers

DailyBlogTips has published 50 simple ways to gain more RSS subscribers.

1. Have a big RSS icon. People are lazy. You need to keep that fact always in mind. If you use a little RSS icon, visitors might have a problem finding it. Most of those will just give up after a couple of seconds, so make sure the RSS icon is big and easily recognizable.

2. Display the RSS icon above the fold. Apart from using a big RSS icon, you must make sure that you display it above the fold. That is where most blogs have one, and that is where people are used to look for when they want to subscribe, so go with the flow.

3. Display the RSS icon on every page of your blog. When I started blogging I did this mistake. Only my homepage used to have an RSS icon…. As soon as I added it to every single page on the blog, the number of subscribers jumped.

Be sure to check out the full list as there are a number of tips I haven’t seen before.

Full RSS Feed Versus Partial

Within the realm of blogging, there are some arguments that seem to go on forever. Whether or not one should use partial or full RSS feeds happens to be one of those arguments. Those in favor of partial feeds usually argue that this prevents duplicate content from showing up on blogs who scrape their content. Based on previous experience and from monitoring the debate across multiple blogs, I’d say that this has become a moot point. For starters, you can’t catch everyone who is ripping off your content. Secondly, you will not get penalized for having duplicate content because it was published on your site first. Google is smart enough to determine where the content was published first.

Full RSS feeds enables the subscriber the luxury of reading what your site has to offer from the comfort of their feed reader. There is no need to click through in order to see the full post. I’ve talked with many blog owners and RSS Feed readers and most of them agree that full RSS feeds are the way to go. Partial feeds are annoying and actually turn many people away from subscribing.

In my own travels across the web, I only subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog if it provides the full feed. I don’t have time to click through to the actual article. I’ll only do that if I want to publish a comment or two. I’ve learned a long time ago that people scraping your content is just another part of blogging. As far as I’m concerned, you can never win the war on content scraping, you can only win individual battles. But what is the point if the battles are never ending? So, my advice is to offer a full content RSS feed to your readers. Anything less is just not worth it.

If that wasn’t convincing enough, perhaps this comic created by Noise To Signal will help.

Post inspired by Cartoon: Partial Text RSS Feeds

Customized RSS Icons Via Photoshop Shapes

Anidandesign.com has released a pretty cool shape set for Photoshop. These shapes will allow you to create RSS icons with shapes that can be enlarged or shrunken while still maintaining high quality. If you are unsure as to what a Photoshop shape is, be sure to read the About.com shape guide which explains the difference between brushes and shapes while also explaining how to install them.

The format for these shapes are Photoshop CS3. Be sure to check out the terms of use as it relates to these shapes.

P.S. My favorite shape is the light bulb, what is yours?

40 Awesome Icon Sets

I’ve published articles relating to icon packs on my own blog for quite awhile now and those posts have served me well in terms of search engine traffic. Also, people seem to love collecting as many icons as they can. With that said, Noupe has gathered up 40 different icon sets which have been hand picked from deviantART. This collection contains icons of donuts, applications, creatures, and much more.

Click here to check out this fantastic icon pack collection.

Let me know in the comments if you would like to see more or less posts highlighting icon packs which are available for free.

Tip: Get more from the delicious.com a.k.a. del.icio.us RSS feeds

Reading the news on blog.delicious.com I discovered a valuable hint regarding the number of items in a delicious.com RSS feed.

We recently limited RSS feeds to 15 items, but you can change that by adding ?count=30 (or up to 100) to the URL.

Source

As the RSS feeds are a very fast source to get an overview about certain topics this possibility will enhance the research experience a lot.

More items in a feed may also be interesting for people who import feed items into their blog.

More notes space coming soon too

Yes, we plan to increase the notes field to 1000 characters. This may not be in place right away after launch, but it’s in the works.

PS: You noticed that del.icio.us is delicious.com now? A great change. Congratulations to the delicious.com team!

Building RSS Group Writing Project

GroupWritingProjects.com is now holding their Building RSS Group Writing Project/Contest. The contest started on July 1st and ends on July 13th which doesn’t leave much time for you to get your entry in. The list of prizes looks pretty impressive with the chance of winning a 30 minute subscriber consultation with none other than Liz Strauss and a 30 minute design consultation with David Airey.

The goal of the contest is to create an awesome guide on how to grow subscriber numbers. They are aiming for the guide to be so good, every blogger will want to link to it or save it as a reference. Be sure to check out the site for more details.

Thanks to Perfomancing user jshare for pointing this out in the public forums.

Where’s the WTF’ing RSS?

I’ll be the first to admit that maybe I just don’t get Technorati’s WTF, Im still trying to work out what the purpose is and whether it’s really useful, but one thing I did notice, is that there is no rss feed!

If im understanding this right, it’s popular topics at Technorati anotated by the community to “explain the buzz” — and if that’s right, then why can’t I get this in Google Reader?

Do tell…

How NOT to Sell RSS

I see these lists all the time, and they never cease to amaze me.

Steve Rubel offers us a post entitled “35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today.”

Here’s a few samples:

Get hotel deals from Marriott
Learn a new word every day using RSS
Track the latest sales with Dealcatcher

Subscribe to the Target circular
Subscribe to movie reviews

Go ahead and check out all 35 if you’d like.

Now, tell me — couldn’t you rewrite that headline to read:

“35 Ways People Used Email in 1998 (And Still Do Today)”

I mean, come on. Just as an obvious example, people have been learning a new word via email for forever. And heck, even I published an aggregated movie review ezine back in the 90s!

Worse, every single one of the 35 listed by Rubel can be done with email today. It’s not like opt-in content delivery originated with RSS feeds.

Here’s the point.

Recently released studies re-affirm that people love getting content by email, and don’t get why they should switch to RSS. Of course when you ask the question “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” and get a negative response, it’s as if you had asked “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?” in 1995 (good one, Scott!).

Regardless, people simply don’t like change. And when you tout RSS on the basis that it does the exact same thing as email when it comes to content delivery, you’ll get nothing more than a shrug and a blank look.

The way to sell RSS is to tell people why it’s better than email.

Or, as Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog correctly commented, RSS “beats email all to heck.” Now, we just need to tell people why.

And I agree that we’ve got to stop calling it RSS. It’s just not going to fly with the masses.

I’m warming up to “content feed” myself. What do you think?

Please feel free to offer any brilliant feed branding ideas in the comments.