Archive for RSS feed
How I Cleaned Up My Inbox and Learned to Love RSS
Posted by: | Comments
Recently I had become frustrated with my management – or rather lack of management – of my email inbox.
As a business owner, a blogger, and an information junkie, I often scour the internet looking for information that will help me run my business or help me help my clients and readers run theirs. When I found something interesting I would usually be offered an invitation to subscribe to an email newsletter or blog feed via email. I usually accepted that offer.
While this had the benefit of keeping me informed about new content, it had a very big downside. My inbox was getting filled with emails that were not written for me alone. I was getting hundreds of emails a day. Emails that required a response or an action from me were getting lost in the noise.
To solve that problem I gradually started switching all my subscriptions to my Gmail account. This helped at first because it did start clearing up my inbox. But that wasn’t really working either. First of all, now I had two places to access mail. To access my Gmail account I had to log in and read it from my web browser. It just wasn’t a part of my daily routine, so I wasn’t logging in.
This led to a new problem. Because I wasn’t logging into my Gmail account regularly, I started re-subscribing with my main email address to feeds and newsletters that were very important to me. Now I was getting them in two places. Arrrrrrrrrgh!
Next I tried RSS. RSS is that little orange button you see in the upper left of this blog. If you subscribe using that button and use a feed reader (which is how you access your RSS subscriptions) you get updated whenever I write a new blog post. No more inbox.
The problem with that is Read More→
Deadline for Switching Your Feedburner Feed is February 28th
Posted by: | CommentsIf you don’t log into Feedburner on a regular basis – and perhaps even if you do – you might not be aware that Google’s purchase of Feedburner has some impact on you.
As of Saturday February 28th, if you haven’t transferred your feed to the new Google account, you won’t be able to check your stats or manage your settings for your RSS feeds until you do transfer your account.
I don’t know why, but this change has not been well publicized. In fact, I only learned about it from Twitter. Someone I follow Tweeted about it, which caused me to dig a bit. I certainly never received a message from Feedburner/Google.
According to Google, you won’t lose your feed; subscribers will still receive your posts even if you don’t migrate your account before February 28th. You just won’t have access to your account.
Changing is easy. I logged into my Feedburner account today and there was a link that let me automatically transfer my account to my Google account. This is the same user and password you use for gmail, Google Alerts etc.
If you have subscribe button for your RSS and a feed counter on your blog, you’ll need to get new code once you’ve made the transfer. I have my subscribe links in a WordPress widget. I just copied the code for Google Feedburner and pasted it over the old code.
According to Google, your stats may take up to 72 hours to transfer. So if you transfer your account, don’t freak out if your stats suddenly go way down. They should be correct within a few days.
What does this mean for you?
Google’s Adsense for Feeds blog writes: “our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.”
But the real change is you can now have Adsense in your RSS feeds. For people using Adsense, I guess this is an important change because you won’t lose revenue because people are reading your posts from within a reader rather than going to your site.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Should Your (and My) RSS Feed Be A Full Post or a Summary?
Posted by: | CommentsRecently on a discussion forum of bloggers a rather heated discussion ensued about whether RSS feeds should send the full post or just the first few lines. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to and had never considered it was a subject that could generate much passion.I began wondering if the passion was unique to bloggers or if readers of blogs felt equally passionate. To find out a posted a question to the “Answers” section of LinkedIn. I was amazed. Readers of blogs were just as passionate – if not more so – than bloggers.
The results of survey showed 74 percent feel very strongly that RSS feeds should include the entire post. They don’t want to click through to the site; they want to read everything in their feed readers.
Nineteen percent felt equally strongly that they want a summary or the first few lines of the post. This allows them to scan their reader to see if a particular post is of interest. If it is then they’ll click through. One responded subscribes to 450 feeds and needs to have this summary.
None of the respondents were on the fence. Everyone felt strongly. Some even stated that if a blog they read offers the wrong type of feed they’d unsubscribe. Wow. What’s a poor blogger to do?
I did get a few respondents tell me it is possible to include both options for subscribers. I will certainly look into this and once I figure it out I’ll be offering a choice to subscribers.
In the meantime, I’d like to do a poll of my RSS subscribers. If you feel strongly one way or another, please leave a comment. I’m willing to go majority rules until I can start pleasing everyone by offering both.
Andrea J. Stenberg
