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RSS

Bigger feed!

by Jim on 21 May 2007

in Missionary-Blogs.com News

After thinking over Dean’s comment on the last post, I decided to do what I was thinking of doing.  I’ve kept the number of posts on the main page to 12, however, I’ve increased the available posts in the feed to 25.

For those who don’t know, there’s a feed on the home page right above the recent posts.  This will bring samples from over 350 missionary blogs right into your news reader.  Because of the way the aggregator currently works, you may see certain blogs a lot for a week or two or three, then other blogs will take their places.  If you find a blog you’re really interested in, visit their site and subscribe directly to their feed.

I’ve had to do some creative tinkering to get the feed and displayed posts to work the way I want, so hopefully it will work smoothly for the next few weeks.

Here’s the feed:  feeds.feedburner.com/Missionary-Blogs.  Every time I add a new blog (every few days, usually) it’s added to the aggregator and has the potential to show up there.

Please tell your friends about this site and the feed.  They can include the feed on their own sites, along with the feed for this blog.  You can see the feed from this blog on the home page, and I see iTravelHealth has included it on their blog as well (see right sidebar).  It’s a great way to see what God is doing in the world and support Christian missions.

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All in a feed – Missionary blog tip #9

by Jim on 15 May 2007

in Blogging and Blog Tips

Everyone needs to have a good, functioning RSS feed. Of course, everyone doesn’t.  But assuming you do, one question keeps coming up – do you publish your entire post via news feed, or just a summary?

For a long time I was a part of the summary crowd, and the logic went like this:  You want people to visit your site – see that sidebar you’ve worked so hard on, see the pictures, visit other parts of the site, and so on.  The best way to do that is to publish a “teaser” – just put a title or the first few lines of each post in your news feed.  Then people have to click over to the site to read the full post.

But I think I’ve finally come over to the other side. I really think it’s better to publish each full post in your feed.  Why?

People are using news readers more and more, and they’re keeping track of more and more friends that have started blogging (not to mention news, cartoons, photo feeds, etc etc etc).  With so much information, it’s convenient to use a news reader.  It’s not convenient to have to click over to the site every time you want to scan a post.  Many people won’t bother.

Listen, you can still encourage people to visit your site in other ways – talk about that neat thing on your sidebar, link to your contact page when you want people to email, link to the photo album.  In fact, it would be best to remember that more and more people will be reading via news feed – keep that in mind as you write.

Check your settings and subscribe to your own feed so you can be sure of exactly what people are seeing.  And remember to make people aware of your feed – talk about it and make sure you make it easy to subscribe.

Most of our bloggers here do follow this tip.  However, here are a couple of posts on RSS:  An older post at Missionary Geek on reading what you want to read, and a video on TheBellSite – RSS in plain English.  I also wrote on my personal blog about RSS.

disciplemexico.org RSS
Asian Greenhouse RSS
The Poulette Family RSS
3 blogs with nicely displayed RSS feeds.
From top to bottom, disciplemexico.org, Asian Greenhouse and The Poulette Family.

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