Reading RSS? Subscribed by e-mail?

How do you read this blog? How do you read other blogs? Are you still surfing around randomly, or have you started organising yourself around subscriptions? Perhaps you’re reading this whilst surfing on a blog traffic exchange like Blog Explosion or Blog Advance?

I provide a form on the right hand side (the “sidebar” as it is called in WordPress and on many other blogging platforms) to subscribe to updates via email. You can also use the RSS feeds provided just underneath the email subscription box to keep up to date via My Yahoo!, Google, MSN and specific RSS software. If you comment on a post, you can choose to receive replies to that post by email so that you can follow the conversation.

On my Palm, I have software called Quick News which allows me to synchronise with blogs I read each time I HotSync to my PC. I can therefore keep up with several blogs and download all their latest posts in one go. On my PC, I use Bloglines because that will travel from machine to machine with me. I’m already a heavy My Yahoo! user so eventually I will migrate over to that, but currently Bloglines has the advantage of displaying all the text of a post (where supported in the initial RSS feed) and images – My Yahoo! currently only supports extracts.

Let me know what you use – if you have any tips for RSS readers, if you’d like to see anything to make your life easier whilst reading blogs, and how you read this post the first time.

2 Comments

  1. Not a believer in feeds. I provide them, and insert ads on them, but I’d rather visit the website.

  2. Simon

    12/2/2006 at 11:37 am

    Hi CT

    Given the space in your sidebar for feeds, I imagine it does nonetheless affect your readership. My stats suggest that the RSS feeds are the most read files on my server, but I expect that bots (automatic checks by Yahoo!, Google, etc) account for a lot of that.

    I prefer reading on the site itself for most blogs, however RSS feed tracking helps me know which sites have updated. If an article isn’t of interest to me, I won’t go over to the site. There are also some sites that are difficult to read, but have interesting content. RSS allows you to read the site in a simple formatting style.

    In terms of opinion on advertising: I don’t go for it personally – maybe if I suddenly had stacks of traffic I might consider some discreet advertising, but I’m not in it for the money.

    -Fruey