DevBlog

So you have a blog. So do I. So does everyone else...or so it seems. But the big question is, how do you provide your RSS feed? Do you provide an Atom feed? Is it RSS? Both? Here are a couple of rules that I follow when subscribing to a blog.

First, you must provide a link on the blog for subscription. I don't care if it's RSS or Atom. Either will work. But, if you don't have a link, my aggregator (News Gator) won't find the feed and I won't go looking for it.

Second, your feed must provide the entire blog entry. If you only provide the first few lines, I won't subscribe either. Why? A couple of reasons. First, News Gator downloads what's in the feed. This means I can download, then go offline and read the content. If it's not all there, I can't get to it. Second, and you can call me lazy on this one, if I am online, I don't want to have to click to read everything. Sorry...but of you have a blog, you obviously think you have something to say and want people to read...so make it easy for them to do so. FYI, if you change your feed to only provide a few lines, I'll unsubscribe you.

One more thing. FeedBurner is a great place to provide your subscriptions.