Feeds and Reads

Ok, this is going to be a little bit on the technical side. The other day, I was cruising through the Church Directory and I was amazed at how many blogs listed there don't have an RSS feed, or at least don't advertise it if they have one.

RSS feeds are simple to set up, and let a LOT more people have access to your content. I admit -- since I started using an RSS reader, I've gotten lazy. I don't visit as many sites as I used to (though I still run through my main blogroll once or twice a week). It's easier to fire up the reader (right now I'm using Blog Navigator, which is quite nice) and skim headlines, and read the selections I want to, rather than surfing around and wading through a lot of things I'm not interested in to get to the one that I want to read. It's actually cut my surfing time in half (which my family loves -- my wife can actually get on the computer herself now!), and it makes things more efficient.

If you have a Blogger blog, you have a feed, whether you know it or not. Just go to settings, site feed, and say "yes" to "Publish Site Feed" and you're set. I recommend setting the descriptions to 'short' but that's just me. Once you do that, you have an ATOM feed, which most RSS readers can read just fine. If you need something a little more detailed, check out Feedburner. They syndicate, AND provide stats on how many subscriptions you have, how many times your feed is accessed, etc. You get stats that your stat tracker won't give you, PLUS you get some great tools -- I love the animated headline feature like this:

RSS is the wave of the future. Actually, it's the wave of the present. Get on board, if you want to increase readership really easily.