When is the last time you stopped to think about the health of your feed? Maybe it’s time to head over to the Feed Validator and ensure it’s in peek performance.

While checking a sites feed the other day I ran across a validation error. It seems that Firefox’s built in feed reader couldn’t render the feed. Google Reader got around the issue, but I wasn’t sure about other readers. One way or another, the feed was in need of a fix.

A quick run though the Feed Validator and it spit out the problem; a blank line before the XML declaration.

The nice thing about the Feed Validator tool is that it gives you helpful hits on what to look into. It said:

Solution

• Check your wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your theme’s functions.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.

Well I was out all last week on vacation. It was very nice and I didn’t use a computer once; except for a slot machine. But now I’m back and my feed reader is overloaded with hundreds of unread posts. How does one catch up?

My thoughts are this:

1. Spend a couple hours reading though them.
2. Spend an hour quickly scanning them and not really reading anything.
3. Mark all as read and just start fresh.
4. Spend the next week or two catching up on a few feeds at a time.
5. Multi Task by reading feeds and watching American Idol at the same time. (ha ha)

Now I love the information in each feed, but when someone misses a few days, the unread count can be overwhelming. So much that I avoided them all together yesterday.

Have any tips or thoughts on how to handle feed overload?

[tags]feed,rss,feed-reader[/tags]

I just got done posting a comment on David Naylor’s blog and I’d like to stay involved with the conversation, however there is no ability to say connected via email or feed. This then disconnects the commenter’s from the discussion unless they remember to come back.

A quick fix would be to enable comment notifications. Wordpress has a great plugin called Subscribe to Comments which will allow all readers to subscribe to any post. If you subscribe to a post’s comments, you’ll get notified via email when a new response has been added. This is great if you asked a question or made a comment that someone else responds to. It also brings the visitor back to your blog to where they might participate in more discussions.

Lets not forget that post comments can help a posts rankings/visibility. All comment text is indexable and will work for the post. A good comment discussion can possibly help increase the rankings and visibility.

Did you also know that in Wordpress, each post has it’s own feed for comments? Bringing this out into the open gives users the ability to subscribe in their favorite feed reader and not their email box. Simply add /feed/ after most Wordpress URLs and you should end up with the posts comment feed. This is how I’m staying connected to the post on David’s site.

With the launch of Firefox 2 yesterday, one of the nice improvements came with how the browser interacts with feeds. Instead of the default source code view that Firefox 1 showed, Firefox 2 how gives users a nicer layout and the ability to add the feed to their favorite feed reader.

No longer is a raw feed seen as ’scary’ by the average user and, with feed reader integration, it might help more people get into reading feeds without really knowing it. I think Firefox 2 will help people figure out feeds & feed readers on their own rather than try and understand how they work first.

Apple’s Safari has been doing this for over a year now and I think that IE7 also handles feeds better. This is just one step in helping the general public understand feeds & feed readers.

[tags]firefox,feed,feed-reader,ie7,sasfari[/tags]

Feedblitz, one of the most popular feed to email services got quite a make over today as Feedblitz 2 launched.

Along with the new look and feel comes a wealth of new features including an upgraded API, monetization, publishing, tags, stats, subscribe to comments, diagnostics, speed and more.

I haven’t had much time to play with the new Feedblitz, but it’s looking quite nice. If you’ve dug around, share your thoughts on the upgraded service.

[tags]feedblitz, email, feed, rss[/tags]

Blogs sure are great, and owners are doing everything they can to optimize them for search engines, but what about people? There are a few usability plugins that make it easier for visitors to interact with your site.

Optimal Title / SEO Title : Good title tags are not just for search engines. They also appear in the users history and possibly bookmarks. Title tags should be specific -> generic. So, don’t start all your tittle tags with your blog name please.

Subscribe to Comments : Getting comments is one trick, keeping the people up to date on the comment discussion is important. I can’t think of how many times I’ve posted and then I couldn’t remember where I made my comments. Email notifications is a great way to get updates on comments and keep your visitors connected.

Chicklet Creator : A big feature of blogs is the syndication abilities. Having a feed is great, but making it easy to subscribe to is even better. (This is one of my projects.)

Spam Detection : Reading a blog full of viagra and casino comment spam is not fun. Chances are, it’ll annoy your users too and they’ll stop visiting.
- Akismet
- Spam Karma