Finally, I found another good point of providing full feeds – backing up your posts! Just a few days ago, my site was down for more than 12 hours. The main reason is the hosting server’s hard disk crashed. It was very strange because it’s a new server less than 1 month old~ So after my webhosting replaced the hard disk and put my site back online, I found that 1 of my post is gone. Why? It wasn’t backed up before the hard disk crashed.

Normally I would be really lazy to rewrite the post. But then I thought of something –> I can copy back my post from my feeds! And there goes, I fired up my Google Reader and view all items of M3nghua.com (I subscribed to my own feeds, just to make sure there are working~) and luckily my previous post was still there!

The only thing that left out is the image files because they were not back up as well. So I copy and paste, uploaded the image files to my server (luckily I haven’t deleted them yet~) and boom! That post was published again in just a few minutes!~ Thank god I provided full feeds huh? Seriously, I think this trick is only available provided that you burn your feeds in Feedburner. I guess Feedburner saves the feeds once they are burned right?

So this is another good advantage of providing full feeds to your reader. Who said full feeds are not useful huh?

Have you ever subscribed to some RSS feeds that only shows you the partial feeds? Or are you one of the blog authors that provide partial feeds to your readers? Partial feeds only show a part of the content of a post, mostly around 50 words of the starting part of it. Well to be honest with you, I get very annoyed with those kinds of feeds. Yes, very annoyed .

The reason of most blog authors that provide partial feeds to their reader is that they scared that their traffic to their blog will decrease. To them, the RSS feeds is just something that inform the readers that a new post had posted in their blog. But the fact is, it is a big no no to a blog. Like I said, partial feeds mostly starts with the first 50 words of your post. Let’s say you want to write something about a car accident that happened to you today…

Today I woke up quite late because I slept around 3am spending the whole night on my project. It was a tough one and I had to finish it by today. Then… blablabla…

Sorry for the stupid story . Did you see my point here? The point is, for 50 words of the start of the blog posts, the feeds did not focus on any of the main point that the blogger is trying to point out. Readers just won’t get attracted to click on the link to the blogger’s site to read the whole post of it. As for my personal experience, I would think like this after reading the title and the partial feeds,

Yeah right, you involved in an accident, what’s the big deal…

Then, I skipped to the other feeds. This gets even worse if the blog post is full of photos. The feed will only show the words of the post as most of these posts are just one liners of words after each photos. And then the evil inside of me will ask me to skip the feeds again.. heheh..

Full RSS Feeds?

Most readers enjoyed reading full feeds. Why? Readers, like me, don’t need to visit the blog just to read the whole post as the post can be read in our favourite RSS reader. Bloggers might worry about the drop of traffic because readers will just read their posts without visiting their site. In my opinion, if the blog’s content is good enough, people will stick to it. Then, the readers will start interact with the bloggers by commenting in their posts. This actually increases the interact between bloggers and readers. Words spread out and readers keep increasing for the blog. Don’t believe me? Just try it.

Of course, there are pros and cons of providing full feeds and partial feeds to readers. Still, I fully recommend that bloggers should provide full feeds to their readers as there are a lot of readers that are lazy to visit a blog just to read the full feeds (like me… ). Unless the blogger can write something interesting in the first part of the posts to attract the readers, no one will visit the blog.

I hope enjoyed my post here. I’ve been struggling to finish this post because I was lack of vocabulary and I find it hard to express what I actually meant.

The feed icon, RSS feed is one of the most important button in a website. It allows users to subscribe to the contents of the website and keep up with the updates of it. Although the RSS feeds are getting a lot popular nowadays but still there are a lot of people don’t really know what RSS feeds are. They just keep hearing about subscribing to website’s feeds but don’t know what the heck is it . So here I’ll clear things up by explaining what is RSS feeds and also how to subscribe to it.

What is RSS?

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ‘subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

Source: Wikipedia

By subscribing to a feed, you can read your favourite websites’ updated content in your feed reader without visiting the websites. Basically its like subscribing to newspaper or email newsletters. When a website updates, you will get notifications on your feed reader. The content on the website will be delivered to your feed reader. The benefit of this? You don’t need to waste your time opening your favourite websites one by one just to check for updated contents!

How to subscribe then?

There are a lot of feed reader services available on the internet. For example: Newsgator, Bloglines, Google Reader and a lot more. Personally I like using Google Reader just because of its fast and easy interface. Whenever you found a website that you would like to subscribe to its feeds, just click on the feed button of the website (the bright orange color button above). Different web browser will do different things when you click on the feed button. As for Mozilla Firefox, you can set what to do when you click on a feed icon in the Tools>Options>Feeds.

Just set which type of feed reader that you used and every time you click on the feed icon, it will automatically redirect you to the page of your feed reader for you to add the feed into your subscription. Confused? Another easy way is that you copy the feed address and add it into your feed reader to subscribe it. As for m3nghua.com, my feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/m3nghua .

Once you finish these steps, you had already subscribed to the websites’ feeds. You will receive the content of the updates whenever the websites update.

This is how feeds look like in Google Reader. You might want to check this out to optimize your Google Reader.

Want to track your readers on feeds?

For website owners, there are some free services that will provide you the statistics of the readers on your websites’ feeds. Feedburner is one of those services. Just register an account, put in the link of your website to burn the feed, then put the feed icon in your website. You will get to know how many readers are reading your feeds and other statistics as well. That’s easy!

So this concludes for my article on RSS feeds. Good luck trying on this RSS trend~ Remember to subscribe to my feed too!

Credits to: Blogging Pro