Another Opinion Among Many

That’s my traffic stat for the rss and atom feeds to this site.  That’s significant.  There are many sites who have ignored this and suffered because of it.  Do you think about your feeds? Now, for anyone who does read this site via rss feed (or the 4.17% who use atom), let me know what you think of the presentation in your feed, if you feel like it.  You can send me an email (see the link above in the menu bar), or comment on this post (which means that you’ll have to click out of your feed reader).  I’ve disabled hotlinking for images, so some feed services won’t show them.  Let me know if that bothers you, as well.  I just don’t want to enable some bandwidth thief to bother with my images.  I want to make them go to the work of saving my images and uploading them to their own hosting, as I have.

That’s it, just like the tire foam commercial.

I have added the Subscribe2 plugin to my site as a measure to ensure that anyone who really wants to try and keep up with my fast paced writing will be able to do so.  After reading RT Cunningham’s convincing article on Untwisted Vortex, I decided that this was a good idea.  See the link to the right? Plop your email address in there and you should get an email notification every time I post something new.  If I published more often, I’d provide a digest.  But, since its rare for me to post more than once a day, I’ll send every time that something new comes up.  AFAIK, this doesn’t work for comments, though.

My original solution was to follow Feedburner’s suggestion of providing email subscriptions their way.  I tried desperately to get Feedburner to work with my site, but they just don’t want to wait for my feed.  For some reason, I feed my posts in a manner that is just a tad too slow for Feedburner’s impatient timeout and there doesn’t seem to be any trick that works to get Feedburner to accept my post feed.  The comments feed shows up in a split second, though.  The Feedburner help documentation had suggested that I could use SendMeRSS to send the posts via email and, after creating their widget, I was supposedly in business.

I got to thinking that there must be a way that I can do this myself, rather than rely on yet another external service to do my work for me.  I know that the philosophy is to delegate your work, but this is different.  This is why I decided to continue feeding through my own link (http://coreythompson.com/feed/ and http://coreythompson.com/comments/feed/).  The RSS feed links are still embedded in the sidebar as well.  I’ve moved them all to the top so that they’re easier to see quickly.

Consider this post the first test of the new way (I get an email every time, as my email address is in the TO: field and everyone else will be in the BCC:, which means no email marketing lists will be collected by anyone this way).  As usual, I will use your email address only for its intended purpose and never give it out.