Comments on: Why feed-reading users are important

By: Patrix

Patrix — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:14:51 +0000

Gaurav, oooooh! And I thought it was a cartelian decision to be more inclusive :)

By: Gaurav

Gaurav — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:33:31 +0000

Hey patrix, I have enabled comments only for people to respond to the quiz I have put up. once responses dry up, I will remove the comments.

By: Patrix

Patrix — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:50:59 +0000

Nitin, thanks. I guess needs of the readers triumphs everything, eh? Thanks for opening up the feeds though. Mostly I did click through to your site but have skipped some posts occasionally because they weren’t offered in full.You would be surprised how popular feeds by email also are.

Feed readers have really gotten user-friendly these days and although Bloglines remains a hot favorite, I personally recommend Google Reader.

Kuttan, I agree that some bloggers could do more about customizing their feeds and make occassional posts on how things are handled at the backend and if there have been drastic changes like changing the feed reader. But frankly, if they don’t it is their loss.

By: Kuttan

Kuttan — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:42:09 +0000

I’m a feed abuser. I only go to the original posts If I have to comment which is not that often hence at times I don’t visit the blogs directly for months.
One gripe I have about the feeds is that sometimes the publishers change the feeds url without any notice and newer posts never show up and the reader don’t actually realize this for days or weeks especially. This becomes a problem when you have a large number of feeds. I currently subscribe to over 130 feeds and so at times it takes you a while to realize that some feeds have to not been updating or you see someone else linking to one of the newer post of a blog you read and u realize your feeds are not working anymore.
I wish the content publishers would treat their feed readers with more respect and I’m glad that more and more people are realizing that and moving in the right direction.

By: Nitin

Nitin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 05:18:58 +0000

Patrix,

Nice post.

The main reason why I switched to full posts was reader feedback. It seemed to be the most common thing on their wishlist. Some of them actually have used FeedBlitz or suchlike to get the posts via email (corporate firewalls block feedreaders) so they are very happy now.

An added bonus is that the text formatting comes out better with full feeds. I usually have a subtitle in bold, which used to get mixed up with the body text in the excerpt.

By: Patrix

Patrix — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:50:59 +0000

Gauravonomics,

I also wrote about â€œhow to retain feed subscribersâ€ some time back.

I saw your trackback at Darren Rowse’s blog on a related post and thought of writing this. Thanks for the Antileech tip although it sounds ultra-strict and might block regular readers too.

By: Gauravonomics

Gauravonomics — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:40:50 +0000

Hey, Try Antileech to protect your feed against sploggers and offer category-wise Feedburner feeds. It's quite amazing, really! I also wrote about "how to retain feed subscribers" some time back. Not that I have too many of them, anyway. :-)