Feed Your Readers: RSS, Subscriptions & Beyond
April 10th, 2011

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For the next post in my Field Guide to Better Blogging, I want to focus on RSS feeds, email subscriptions and newsletters, and the tools you can use to make your life that much easier.

What is RSS?

RSS — short for “Really Simple Syndication” — is an easy way to consume blogs, news, and other information on the web. A feed will contain whatever information the author chooses, usually a post title and summary, excerpt or full post content.

It basically prevents users from visiting every website individually to read updated content. Can you imagine how long that would take? As it is, I have to set aside a chunk of time during the week to go through my feeds. There are many different ways to manage your own site’s feed as well as keeping up with the feeds you subscribe to.

What does your RSS feed URL look like? In Blogger, your feed URL will look something like http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss and elsewhere something like http://awesomesuperdupersite.com/feed.

Contents

Quick Tip: Clicking a section link below will scroll the page to the relevant section.

• Publishing Your Feed
• RSS-related Plugins
• Feed Directories
• Email Subscriptions
• Email Newsletters
• Feed Readers
• Resources

Publishing Your Feed

Every blog service I know of comes with a built-in RSS service. So, you don’t usually need to worry about dealing with your own RSS file. Getting your feed out there is a matter of posting the link for your readers to subscribe to — it can be a linked button, linked text to your feed or even an email subscription form. But what about managing your feed? My service of choice is FeedBurner.

FeedBurner

I could write a whole post alone on FeedBurner (note to self!) but I’ll go over the basics here. FeedBurner is a service — powered by Google — that helps to publish and optimize your RSS feed. Quick-start steps:

1. Login to FeedBurner with your Google account.
2. Enter your blog’s URL under “Burn your feed right this instant.” FeedBurner will attempt to find your site’s feed.
3. Choose your feed title and slug for the new URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SLUG), it should be consistent with your blog.
4. DONE! Your FeedBurner feed should now be live.

Nifty FeedBurner features:

• Built-in statistics: You can track how people are viewing your feed and how often your posts are clicked on through the feed.
• Email subscriptions: FeedBurner offers direct email subscriptions for your readers. Simply grab the code and paste it into your site — a text widget (WordPress) or HTML gadget (Blogger) works fine.
• Email branding: When you use FeedBurner to send your email RSS updates, you can add your blog’s logo as well as customize the text and link styles.
• Google AdSense integration: If you have a Google AdSense account, you can add an ad after every post in your feed.
• Browser friendly: By using BrowserFriendly under “Optimize,” FeedBurner applies clean visual formatting to the eyesore of raw feed XML for much improved readability in all modern web browsers.

If you’re a Blogger user and decide to use FeedBurner, make sure you add the FeedBurner redirect from your Settings:

RSS-related Plugins

WordPress Plugins

RSS Management

• FeedBurner Widget: A sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner RSS subscribers stats button. FeedBurner provides the code for this, so you don’t necessarily need the plugin, but this does make it pretty easy.
• FeedBurner Subscription Widget: Another sidebar widget that will show the FeedBurner email subscription form in your sidebar. Again, you don’t have to install a plugin for this, Feedburner provides the code you need, all you’d have to do is paste it into a Text widget.
• Feed Wrangler: (advanced users) A simple plugin that allows you to create custom feeds for your WordPress blog. A great use case would be if a sponsor asks you to place an ad in your feed.
• AddToAny Subscribe Button: If you want a quick button with lots of RSS subscription options for your readers, this is a good plugin to have.

RSS Stats

• FeedBurner FeedSmith: Makes sure that all your RSS feed subscribers get redirected to your FeedBurner feed and counted along with the ones signed up via FeedBurner.
• FeedStats: A simple statistics tool for your feed if you don’t use FeedBurner.
• WordPress.com built-in stats: WordPress.com provides built-in stats from your stats panel. Simply click on the icon of the post you’d like to see stats for, and you’ll see syndicated views on the graph.

Copyright

• ©Feed: Mentioned in my splog post, this plugin will add a copyright message to the bottom of your feed posts.

Blogger Gadgets

Subscription Links Gadget

This Blogger gadget makes it easy to add an option for readers to add your blog’s post and comment feeds to their feed readers.

Subscribe by Email Gadget

This Blogger gadget makes it easy for you to add an email subscription form to your site.

Kristin’s Social Gadget

I created the code and icons for a basic gadget that you can paste into a plain HTML gadget. It will show buttons for RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, your email, and Bloglovin’. Simply copy the code from the box below exactly as it is and paste! Make sure to update the URLs to your own, I put them in all caps so they’re easy to find.

<br />
<center><a href="FEEDURL"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/rss.png" border="0" /></a>&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/TWITTERUSERNAME"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/twitter.png" border="0" /></a>&nbsp;<a href="http://facebook.com/FACEBOOKUSERNAME"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/facebook.png" border="0" /></a>&nbsp;<a href="TUMBLRURL"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/tumblr.png" border="0" /></a>&nbsp;<a href="mailto:YOU@EMAIL.COM"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/mail.png" border="0" /></a></center>
<br />
<center><a href="BLOGLOVINURL"><img src="http://img.relativelychic.com/social/bloglovin.png" border="0" /></a></center>

Chrome Extensions

• Google Reader RSS Subscriber adds a small button for subscribing to a site’s RSS via Google Reader quickly and easily.



• RSS Subscription Extension adds an RSS icon to your toolbar for one-click subscription. It comes with 4 reader selections.
• Google Reader Unread Count does exactly what it sounds like! Instead of showing “1000+” as your unread label, it will show the exact number of unread items.
• Feedly changes the look of your Google Reader into a magazine-like overlay with lots of sharing options. Integrates with Twitter and also has nifty “you might also like” suggestions.

Firefox Add-ons

• Feedly is also available as a Firefox add-on for those of you using Google Reader!
• RSS Ticker loads your Live Bookmarks and scrolls their entries across your screen while you surf.
• Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension.
• Feed Sidebar displays the items from your Live Bookmarks in the sidebar.
• Brief presents feeds on an interactive page which let’s you bookmark and tag items with a single click.

Google Friend Connect & Networked Blogs

Google Friend Connect and Networked Blogs are both great ways to keep readers in the loop via RSS. Google Friend Connect offers a variety of tools: A members widget, newsletter options, AdSense customization and more. When someone “joins” your site via GFC, they see your feed in their Blogger dashboard and can also pull the feed into Google Reader.

Networked Blogs is similar to Google Friend Connect in that your readers “join” the site. Once they’ve joined, your blog is added to their Networked Blogs app in Facebook. You can also feed your blog posts into your Facebook pages — personal or fan page — through Networked Blogs.

Pinging & Feed Directories

Pinging

Ping-o-matic is basically a service to update different blog searches with your blog updates. All WordPress users have this built in — you can see the rpc.pingomatic.com server listed at the bottom of your “Writing Settings” — since Ping-o-matic was Matt Mullenweg’s (creator of WordPress) project. For more info, see the WordPress Codex on Update Services.

If you’re not on WordPress and decide to use the service manually, be sure not to ping too frequently, or you run the risk of being marked as spam.

Feed Directories

RSS Blog Feed Directories are sites for submitting your blog’s feed to. Why? Well, it creates backlinks for your site and they can increase traffic through users discovering your feed. One of the most popular feed directories is Technorati, one of the top blog search engines and directories. If you’re not on any blog search engine, at least start with Technorati.

TopRank has a pretty exhaustive and ever-changing list of RSS Blog Directories if you’d like to get into it.

Email Subscriptions

WordPress, Blogger, and FeedBurner offer easy ways to send subscribers emails with your post updates pulled from your RSS feed.

WordPress

WordPress.com includes a ready-made widget for email subscriptions, simply drag it into your widget sidebar and fill in the fields. Your readers will receive a confirmation email for the subscription.

WordPress.org: As for a WordPress.org install, you have a few options:

• FeedBurner User: Use any of the aforementioned FeedBurner plugins.
• FeedBurner User: Paste the email subscription form code into a text widget.
• Non-FeedBurner User: Subscribe2 is a WordPress plugin for managing and sending emails to subscribers directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Blogger

Blogger offers a simple Subscribe by Email gadget that adds an email subscription form to your site.

FeedBurner

FeedBurner’s email subscription settings are pretty straightforward. You can customize the look and feel of your email update, when they’re delivered every day, and code is provided for your form.

Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are great for updating your readers on new features, an exclusive coupon or offer, popular posts, or even with your RSS feed.

MailChimp

If you’d like to send a newsletter to your subscribers, MailChimp is one of the nicest sites for building an attractive newsletter with ease — they offer guides, theme builders, and tiered pricing with a free option. There are many reasons to send out a newsletter to your subscribers (coupons, site changes, etc.) and if you’d like to send them updates from your feed, you’re in luck.

MailChimp will guide you through the process of setting up your RSS email update campaign, from creating/importing your mailing list to testing out your template.

Feed Readers

Windows-based Readers

• Mozilla Thunderbird: Mozilla’s RSS and email reader.
• Active RSS Reader: Free, and with little hard disk and memory footprint.
• FeedDemon: Syncs with Google Reader, has tags and sharing options as well.

OS X-based Readers (Mac)

• Shrook: Instant notifications via Growl, real-time search, synchronization, and a web-based version as well.
• NetNewsWire: Very clean interface. Free (ad-supported) and paid ($14.95) versions. For Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
• Newsfire: Free, simple to use, lots of features. Group filtering.

Browser-based Readers

• Google Reader: Google’s RSS reader doesn’t only track your feeds, but you can also star items (like in Gmail), view trends in your feeds and reading habits, and recently even read feeds offline.
• iGoogle: The iGoogle homepage allows you to integrate your favorite RSS feeds.
• Netvibes: Almost like a personal homepage, with Netvibes you can integrate your favorite RSS feeds, weather, photos and widgets.
• MyYahoo!: Another personal homepage, you can add RSS feeds among other things.
• Blogger Reader: Although this isn’t exactly a full RSS reader, the Blogger Reader will show you feeds from all of the blogs you’ve followed through Google Friend Connect. You can access this from the Blogger Dashboard.

Mobile Readers

There are SO many feed apps, it’s not funny. It really all depends on preference and what type of smart phone you own (Android, iOS, etc.).

• Google Reader Mobile: Google Reader comes in mobile form, too. Optimized for mobile browsers.
• Feedly: A great app, available on iOS and Android.
• my6sense: Available on iOS and Android.
• Pulse: Beautiful app available on iOS and Android.
• Reeder: Simple, clean reader available on iPhone, iPad, and coming soon for Mac.

Resources

• Ping-o-matic is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated.
• More info on the technical aspects of WordPress.org feeds.
• RSS Mix can combine multiple feeds of yours, if you’d like to integrate them into one.
• Feed Icons has all of the standard feed icons you’ll need — colors and monochrome as well.
• WordPress Reader Settings: Quick support page for controlling how readers view your blog.
• Feedly Tutorial for those who have installed the browser add-on.
• Subscribe2 is a WordPress plugin for managing and sending emails to subscribers directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Sophie Catface sez, "If you liek dis post, plz consider sharing, leaving a comment or subscribing to teh RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed readerz. You can even follow my mommeh on Twitter @relativelychic. TANKS!"