Better Feed is a WordPress plugin that allows the blog owner to add a custom footer to the end of each post in their feed.  This a great way to customize what your readers see when they only read your feed, and don’t click through to your site.

Here are a few things you can do with Better Feed:

• Add a copyright line.
• Add text and links back to your site or blog.
• Add announcements.
• Add an advertisement, promotion or other call to action (CTA).
• Add in tags, categories, comments, author and other post specific items.
• Design it as you want.
• Do pretty much anything.

This is a great solution to the issue of other sites scraping your content and re-posting it as well.  You can ensure that after each post they scrape, it links back to the source. If the scraper site pulls out all the clickable links, you can put the post URL into the feed footer and it’ll still display.

Here are a few examples of feed footers from other sites.

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]

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