Posts tagged as:

News feed

They’re NOT at Your Blog – Missionary Blog Tip #16

by Jim on 19 March 2010

in Blogging and Blog Tips

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying no one is reading your posts.  Lots of people are!  The point is, a lot of those people aren’t actually visiting your blog page.  They’re simply reading your blog through a news reader.

Reading Missionary blogs in Google Reader!
Reading missionary blogs in Google Reader

I know that 90% of the time, I’m reading your posts via your news (ie RSS, ATOM) feed.  So what does that mean to you?

Here are some common problems I notice that you might not be aware of:

  • One of the most common problems is that people reading your posts via a news feed are probably reading your text on a white background.  And lately I’ve noticed some of you writing text in interesting colours – like yellow – which is almost impossible to read on a white background.  Be careful about the colours you use in the text of your post.  (Note – this doesn’t necessarily apply if you have a theme that colours all your text.  But do check out your own blog in a news reader to see how it looks.)
  • Remember, when people rarely or never visit your site, they won’t see all the links and things you’ve put on your sidebar.  They won’t see your nifty background and special effects.  If there’s something you want them to be reminded of, link to it in the post.  (For example, if you want them to contact you, link to the contact page in the post itself.)
  • Some blogs like WordPress have excellent plugins that can add a lot to your actual RSS feed – such as links to related posts, a link back to your blog, copyright information, and so on.  You can make good use of that feed.  One example is RSS footer.
  • This may sound odd, but make sure your RSS feed has a proper title.  Some feeds have no name at all.  (I’m not talking about post titles – although those are important too!)
  • Consider running your feed through feedburner – it will give you a lot of options, an easy-to-remember feed URL, and even stats on who’s using your feed and how.

Now that you’ve made your feed so much more feed-friendly, promote it!  Let people know they can subscribe, tell your church they can have your posts automatically appear on their site, and, of course, if you’re a missionary blogger tell me about it so that I can put you in our aggregator (on the main page here)!  (And in the main feed here: feeds.feedburner.com/Missionary-Blogs)

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Why so many use Feedburner – Missionary Blog Tip #14

by Jim on 28 July 2009

in Blogging and Blog Tips

One of our earliest tips – waaaay back in 2005 – was to make sure you have a functioning, visible, accessible, news feed.  Though the vast majority of missionary bloggers now have functioning feeds, it’s amazing how many still don’t have a visible, easy to find, working link or button to their feed.

One of the best tools that people use to manage their feed is Google Feedburner.  Though far from perfect, it gives you a lot of tools to make your feed much more powerful.

In a nutshell, Feedburner takes your feed URL and runs it through their service, giving you a brand new URL that you choose,like feeds.feedburner.com/(yourblogtitle).  So what are the advantages of this?

  • It gives you what can be a permanent feed.  Many people change blogs addresses or blog software over time.  You can have your new blog point to the same Feedburner feed, so your feed readers will still know where you are.
  • Feedburner gives you great tools for promoting your blog and feed.  For example, email signatures, animated headlines for other sites, and buttons for your blog itself.  As I wrote in my original post on feeds, there’s incredible value to having people subscribe to your feed and have instant access to your prayer requests, etc.
  • Feedburner gives you easy to read statistics for your feed.  Admittedly, many of us don’t have that many readers, so statistics may not be that interesting.  However, it still gives you an idea who’s interested in your feed and how they read it and what countries they come from.
  • It gives you an easy to remember feed URL, one that you choose.  In fact, in some cases you can even create a URL on your own domain (not feeds.feedburner.com) that still runs through the Feedburner service.
  • You can do various things to customize your feed.  For example, you can make it more accessible to a wide variety of feed readers.

There’s a reason why so many bloggers continue to use Feedburner.  Give it a try, and I think you’ll find it’s worth it!

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Missionary Blog RSS Feed

4 October 2008

If you’re subscribed to the Missionary Blog feed, or if you’ve been watching the home page here, you’ve probably noticed that things have heated up quite a bit. In other words, it has been updating faster, with a wider variety of blogs.  Great, right? The good news is that gradually improving technology is allowing me [...]

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