Keeping Up With The Joneses...Or At Least Their Blogs

This post was originally written as an email response to a question on the Sisters in Crime group about why blog "hit counters" often don't reflect the actual number of a blog's readers. Someone on the list asked about "feed readers". It occurred to me that having the information here, on a blog, wouldn't be a bad thing.

A "feed reader" essentially compiles/aggregates information from any number of sources. They were originally all "RSS" readers. RSS stands for "really simple syndication," which explains the intent of "feeds" quite nicely--it was a protocol designed to make it really easy for you to get your information without flitting from one place to another all over the web every day. Now you'll see them called Atom Feed, XML Feed, Blog Feed, all kinds of things. You'll see "Technorati Feed" or "FeedBurner Feed" because those are two very popular readers. (The Wickipedia definition is more detailed and less personal than what I'll say below.)

There are two main categories of feed readers:
- standalone
- through your web browser

I use a standalone feed reader, which means there's a program that runs on my computer all the time collecting whatever is new from however many sources I may have added. Whenever I want to see what's new in the world, I look in that program. It collects not only blogs, but newspapers, alerts, all kinds of stuff. I use the standalone because I subscribe to some outrageous number of sources, and I haven't found a web-based reader that conveniently shows me the full text of that many sources without clutter.

As an example, however, I set up a little NetVibes page of feeds to give you an idea of what I mean. (Readers of this blog may note I've mentioned NetVibes before. What can I say? I am a creature of habit.)

NetVibes is a very cool web-based reader because it allows you to add gadgets like the weather one and the Craigslist one I have on that page as well as feeds, so a lot of people use it for a home page. If you look in the address bar (where the URL is), you'll see a little orange box over on the right that looks like it has radio waves coming out of it. That's a "syndication" icon. If you click that, it will ask you whether you want to "subscribe to Laura K Curtis' activities". Any Blogger blog, Wordpress blog, TypePad blog will have that icon in the menu bar. If you use a feed reader, clicking that little orange icon will add the blog to your subscription list for your preferred program. (I am sure others also have it, but those are the ones that come to mind immediately.)

The standalone programs I've tried look a lot like mail programs. (In fact, many mail programs function as feed readers if you want them to, including the newest version of Mac Mail.)

Clicking the picture above will give you a bigger image, so you can see what a non-browser-based feed reader looks like. I've marked all the items as "unread" so you can get a sense of what it would look like if I didn't keep up with it!

Some blog sites allow you to set your "syndication" so that only a small portion of a post is broadcast to a feed reader, forcing anyone interested to actually go to the site for the rest, but that peeves a lot of my more geeky friends, so I don't recommend it, even though it may make the hit count higher on the blog. (The subject of "the numbers game" is one I've addressed here in the past.) Mind you, I don't read the full text of the articles from all the newspapers and blogs in my feed reader, but the headlines give me a sense of things, and I can pick and choose which ones I do want to read.

But the thing is, as I mentioned earlier, when my feed reader goes around every half hour automatically checking to see "what's new" and collecting its data, it doesn't leave a "footprint" for the site tracker. And it only picks up the "news," not the general page changes, so it won't "see" polls or sidebar items. To make sure your feed-reader-using fans see the cool stuff you put in your sidebars, don't forget to put up a post about what you've changed.