Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader

One of the most frustrating aspects of reading blogs through feed readers is the process of commenting on blogs. The typical step-by-step process is: Scan through the blog post titles. Find an interesting title and click on the title to open it and read. Want to respond or read more? Open the post title in […]

Bringing the Best of the Best Blogging Resources to Your Feed Reader

I recently highlighted Liz Strauss’ list of 20 Blog Promotion Guides to Inform Your Strategy and she’s done it again with Strategy: 40 Outstanding Blog Links, Bookmark Carefully!. What is blog reading and commenting to you? Is it entertainment, interaction, or research for your work? How much time do you spend on the average day […]

TechCrunch: Review of Online, Web-based Feed Readers

Techcrunch offers “The State of Online Feed Readers”, a look and review at what is available for reading feeds, the features available, and which ones score best. Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines. Google Reader […]

Aggcompare – Comparison Directory of Feed Aggregators and Readers

I had no idea there were so many different feed readers and aggregators available. Aggcompare.com is the Directory of RSS Aggregators, listing dozens of feed readers and aggregators with their features. It’s not pretty, but it’s an amazing list. The features list is huge for each feed aggregator and includes information on which browser it […]

Feed Stats Spike: Feedburner and Google Reader Strikes

Before you get too excited when you check your feed stats, whether you are on a WordPress or a non-WordPress blog, including WordPress.com blogs, don’t get too excited. Reports are flooding the blogosphere as people check their feed stats and think “Wow! I’m suddenly popular.” Calm down. It’s not true. Feedburner’s has started reporting how […]

Blog Exercises: Leave Room for the Reader

“You must leave room for the viewer to rest and breath as they look at your photograph.” These wise words were told to me by a long-time professional photographer, gone these many years. As I studied with her and others saying similar things, I began to understand what they meant and applied it eventually to […]

Blog Exercises: A Link List Post to Dazzle Readers

In blog exercises on making lists and making your lists pretty, we worked on the links, understanding how they work and formatting your styles. In this blog exercise, I want to focus on the content within those links, the real reason people love those link lists. I’d like to cite my friends at Daily Blog […]

Blog Exercises: Choose an Appropriate Gravatar for Your Readers

All WordPress sites have Gravatars integrated into the core. Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars, images that represent you in blog posts comments, featured author images (integrated with Gravatars), author images, BuddyPress, and other Gravatar-enabled features. Near the beginning of this year of blog exercises, you were asked to add or update your Gravatar to represent […]

Reader Appreciation Project: Putting Readers First

Ronald Huereca writes for the Reader Appreciation Project blog and recently caught my attention with My Thoughts on Being Paid to Post. When one starts blogging for money, there are new considerations. Who am I really writing for? Am I writing for my new boss that will pay me per post? Am I writing for […]

WordPress.com Blogs Feeds Scraped

In the most recent WordPress Wednesday News on the Blog Herald, I reported on the mass copyright violations and scrapings of WordPress.com blogs, as reported by Letters Home to You in “Has Anyone Stolen Your Writing Lately?” and “Please Help Me Get Google to Pull Their Ads from a Blogging Thief”. There is also a […]

Blog Challenge: Who Is In Your Feed List?

Who are you counting on to give you the news you need for your blog? To help you find stories to write about and things to comment on? Who are your guides? Mentors? The blogs and sites stuffed into your feed reader that help you understand how this blogging thing works or how the industry […]

Feeds Change How You Write Links

Feed are changing how we write links in our blog posts. Have you noticed? There are two types of links. Absolute links are the most commonly found links in web pages today. They go directly to the source such as: https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/monetizing-wordpress-plugins/ A relative link is one that links relative to the page without the full […]

Live Up To The Expectations of Your Readers

In The Perils of Problogging, Stellify makes some very good points in the issue of having ads on your blog and the business of blogging. However, I want to point out a beautiful statement: If you call yourself a writer because you are a blogger, then live up to the expectations of your readers. More […]

Integrating FeedBlitz Feed Email Service Into WordPress

FeedBlitz is a feed subscription service which includes feeds by email. According to Feedblitz, 11% of web users use feeds and feed readers to track favorite blogs and sites, which leaves a lot of your blog’s visitors struggling to keep up with the latest posts and news from your blog. Since email is a more […]