Anyone who has a blog should know the importance of their site feed. This wonderful feature allows readers to subscribe to a blog, without signing up for anything, or joining a mailing list. Every time one posts to their blog, the site feed is updated, as well.
I absolutely love RSS. It allows me to know at a glance, which sites have updates and whether they look interesting enough to visit. This saves me the trouble of visiting sites that may not have been updated recently.
To have a successful blog, it is important to post regularly, write interesting headlines, and make it easy for visitors to subscribe to the site feed. Then those visitors need an easy way to read these feeds.
There are a number of services that allow one to organize and subscribe to various site feeds, but they require the user to create an account, and then take the time to visit that site to see updates. It’s an extra step, an extra password to remember, and a waste of time. I think a better option is a customized home page like Google personalized, or My Yahoo that allows the viewer to load the page with their favorite RSS feeds. If this page is the user’s start page, then they see their favorite blog updates each time they launch their browser. The new Google Reader is looking very promising, as well.
My favorite RSS reader is included in Thunderbird. Thunderbird is an open source email and newsgroup client that includes a built in RSS reader. This is perfect solution. All one has to do is add the feeds to their News & Blogs section, and then they can get updates every time they check their email. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to buy, and one can monitor as many blogs as they would like. I highly recommend Thunderbird to anyone who needs a robust email client.
What is your favorite RSS reader?
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