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 […]

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 […]

WordPress School: Google Maps

We’ve experimented with image and video embeds in your test site in Lorelle’s WordPress School. We’ve also worked a with WordPress shortcodes in the contact form on the Contact Page, and you’ve gotten a little HTML awareness within your site’s content. Today’s assignment is another form of embed. Today, we are going to embed a […]

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: 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

WordPress Plugins for Feeds

Feeds are the hottest technology on the web today, as far as I’m concerned. I get my news through my feed reader, bringing the web to me instead of me going to it. People are exchanging information through feeds, tracking industries, investments, news, and story ideas. I’ve got three feeds in my sidebar, showcasing links […]

Google Feedfetcher Takes Control. Where is Bloglines?

Well, the developers behind WordPress.com have adjusted things and Google Reader and Google’s Personalized Homepages are now included in the WordPress.com blog feed stats, listed as Google Feedfetcher. This certainly changes things. A lot. As I discussed yesterday, feed statistics spiked all over the web as Google changed how their feeds were reported and discovered […]

Subscribe, Feeds, RSS, Email Mailing List, Blog Update Alerts, and Newsletter WordPress Plugins

Asking someone to “subscribe” to your blog used to mean signing them up on an email list. On a regular basis you would send out an email from that list with news about your site or blog encouraging them to return for a visit. Today’s notion of subscribing to a blog goes way beyond an […]

Creating Custom Feeds For Sites Without Feeds

Whiiiiiiinnnnneee! Why don’t more websites and blogs have feeds? Don’t you know what a feed is yet? Feeds are wonderful things. They allow us to keep up with the Joneses through our feed readers, bringing the latest updated information from a blog or website to our doorstep. Unfortunately, not every website or blog has a […]

Feed Fatigue

Seth Godin writes about RSS Fatigue the loss of interest blog fans are suffering as their favorite blogs work overtime posting multiple posts daily, making the task of keeping up with the bloggers a full-time job. Blogs are different than most other forms of media in one key respect: they stretch. TV and radio confront […]

One Year Anniversary Review: What are Feeds?

As I review this past year’s worth of articles I’ve written, I find that two topics were probably the most life changing for me and many other bloggers: social bookmarking and feeds. In Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!”, I explain what feeds are: Feeds are an awesome […]