Jul 15, 2014 / Advanced

Let’s Talk About RSS Feeds!

Feed readers and your blog: what should you consider?

You probably will not be surprised to hear this, but I read blogs, y’all. A lot of blogs. One might even say, an insane number of blogs. If I subscribed to all of those blogs by email, I’d be overrun, so I am a devoted user of an RSS feed reader for my blog-consumption habits.

A “feed” is a stream of posts or comments that is updated when new content is published. A “feed reader” is an application that lets you subscribe to and read blog feeds.

If you use the WordPress.com Reader, you already use a feed reader, even if you didn’t know it! Other RSS feed readers include Feedly, Bloglines and Bloglovin’.

Why use a feed reader?

The main advantage to following blogs in a feed reader is that you don’t need to keep checking the blog itself to see if there’s a new post or not. You also don’t need to get notifications of new posts by email, or save a ton of bookmarks. Instead, you just load your feed reader, and all the new posts from the blogs you follow are right there! One-stop blog reading.

How to find a blog’s feed

To see your blog’s feed, go to your site and add “/feed” to the end of your URL in the browser address bar. So for example, The Daily Post’s feed would be at: dailypost.wordpress.com/feed/ .

Doesn’t look like much, does it? In fact, depending on the browser you’re using, you might just get an error message. But to an RSS feed reader, what you’re seeing there is all of your most recent posts, complete with their images, videos, and other media. Subscribe to that URL in a feed reader, and you’ll see something like this:

Daily Post feed

You can modify that URL to subscribe to a feed of comments, or only to certain posts: for example, dailypost.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ (all Daily Post comments), dailypost.wordpress.com/category/beginner/feed/ (all Daily Posts in the ‘Beginner’ category), or dailypost.wordpress.com/author/eurello/feed (all Daily Posts written by yours truly).

RSS logo

RSS icon  (via Pixabay)

If you’re trying to find a feed for a site that’s not here at WordPress.com, most feed readers are now intelligent enough to find the feed if you simply add the blog’s domain. Otherwise, many sites will have their RSS feeds linked somewhere on their front page, often with the universal RSS icon.

Note: If you’d like to provide an obvious link to your feed for your readers, use the RSS Links widget!

Decide what to include in your feed

It’s smart to give some thought to how readers using feeds will experience your site. There are a couple of settings that you can control that will affect their experience. These settings are in Settings→Reading in your blog’s dashboard.

How many posts to include

The option for “Syndication feeds show the most recent _ items” controls how many of your recent posts will show up in a feed reader if a new reader subscribes. So if someone subscribes to your feed today, they’ll see, say, the last 10 posts in their reader.

Most recent

Going forward, most feed readers store all past posts, but for new subscribers, this controls how much content they get from the start.

How much of a post to include

Most important is the “For each article in a feed show: Full text/Summary” option. Contrary to popular belief, this does not control whether your posts show as full text or summaries on the front page of your blog. Rather, it controls how they appear in both feed readers and email subscriptions.

If you choose full text, obviously the full text will be delivered via email and feed. If you choose summary, the first few sentences will be delivered, followed by an ellipsis. Readers will have to click through to your site to read the whole thing.

Full text or summary

Keep in mind that people who use feed readers do so because they don’t want to load a lot of different sites. Sometimes people use them because they have poor internet connections. Sometimes they use them because they read a lot of blogs (like me). Either way, if they’re forced to click out of their feed reader to read your blog, they might just unsubscribe from you.

I will admit to you here that personally, I am very unlikely to continue to follow a blog if I don’t get its full text content in my feed reader. There are just too many great blogs, and not enough hours in the day.

However, other people find full text feeds too overwhelming — they like to skim the first few sentences and only load the full post if it catches their interest.

You have to make a decision based on the type of content you publish and the type of readers you have.

Extras you can include

Finally, there is an option for Enhanced Feeds. You can choose to include a post’s categories, tags, its current comment count, and/or sharing buttons in its feed.

Enhanced feeds

 

What about my stats?

If somebody reads your post in an RSS feed reader, that person doesn’t register as a visit in your stats, since they haven’t actually loaded your blog. However, you can still see the number of “syndicated views” of each of your blog posts, which gives you an idea of how many people are following you in a reader.

On the other hand, in the WordPress.com reader, if a reader clicks one of your posts to expand it to the full pop-up window in the Reader, that does count in your stats, just as if they’d visited your post on your blog itself.

Do you use a feed reader? Where do you land on the full post v. summary issue? 

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  2. Elizabeth, I put a lot of images of cycling gear into my blog posts and choose a “featured image” to go at the top of each post. Not sure about the WordPress Reader but the RSS reader I use, Feedly, doesn’t pick up the featured image. Rather it picks another one, somewhat randomly as best I can tell. Any way to control the settings so the featured image is posted to the RSS reader? Thanks, Steve

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Happens to me on occasion on Feedly, too. Not always. But even more mysterious to me is that the WP Reader features a full gallery of my images though I’ve selected just one featured image; and sometimes it shows my full post though my universal settings are for summary only. A bug? In my theme or in the rss readers?

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    2. I may be missing a feature in WP that allows image selection in the WP reader, but it seems to use the first image in the post. That may be the only way it works or may be the default if you don’t designate otherwise.

      One thing I have learned is to not begin the post with an image or to use one to early on in the post. I subscribe to my post so I can see the email notifications others get when I do a new post. If the image is the very first element in the post, the first lines of the notification are HTML code for the post. Especially if you use summary notifications in email, its good to not use an image in the post until a few lines of text.or the summary is over run with the HTML. which tells nothing about the post. I made this mistake with only one post. The post was titled Priceless. If and when the blog ever gets out of suspension, which is a God awful arbitrary and poorly communicated process I would wish on no one, you can see an example of what I mean. Since the post is older, I have not bothered to change it. I happen to like the way I have the post composed so I see no need to change it for that reason. I will just avoid doing it in the future…if I ever hear from WP and get my blog back.

      It’s been about 36 hours now and still no word as to why or how to fix things or oops, we were a bit hasty and made a mistake, Search “suspended blog” to see how frustratingly they handle the process. They seem so folksy and benign with the tutorials and written philosophy about blogging and digital communication but when there is TOS issue the bureaucracy comes out and you are just stunned by how poorly and ineffectively they handle the problem. You truly feel as if you have become and instant enemy of the state. Talk to me. Tell me. Let’s fix this. But not until they are ready. Take a ticket; take a seat, but we aren’t telling you what your number is or what number we are currently working of even acknowledging that we have received your request for review. It is limbo land at it’s best.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Steve and Jann – if you’re noticing any sort of issue with image selection, drop us a line and we’ll look into it. It’s possible this is set on Feedly’s end, but we can take a look.

      Dan, I see your blog is back up now.

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  3. Good timing for me, too. I spent about 2 hours trying to figure this out and trying to decide if u wanted to add it to my sidebar. I downloaded NewsBar to my Mac and fell in love with it … The concept of allowing others to access mine that way was still illusive. You’ve helped out a lot. Thanks!!

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  6. Excellent idea! I was actually just looking for a way to stop all these emails but still get the updates and stumbled across this post. My Chromebook wouldn’t show any of the rss feeds when I typed “/feed” at the end of any website address, but I was able to download an app “Inoreader” which does the job. I use this computer most of the time so this works for me.

    Again, thanks for the info!

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    1. Yep, the feeds themselves don’t look like much to human eyes, you have to use a reader. I hadn’t heard of that app, thanks for the mention! 🙂

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  8. Thanks for the info. I had no idea about the magnifying glass that gave me syndicated vs. non-syndicated reader statistics per blog post

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  9. Thanks a lot! I am new to this whole blogging thing, and was searching Google for a simple answer to explain “feed reader”. By random coincidence I find the best answer in my WordPress reader. Cheers!

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  12. I use WordPress’ Reader and Feedly. I’m experimenting with BlogLovin. I’ve always liked it when the whole blog post is included but understand why others only have partial and I will click through if I’m hooked. I’ve never understood how the RSS feed views are captured and I am glad to know this.

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  15. This is something I thought I understood as a blog reader, but now that I’m also a blog author I’ve been very confused. Thanks for the info gathered here, and explained so well.

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