After I wrote my full RSS feed post where I explain why & how you can ensure a full RSS feed for your blog, one of my friend told me that despite installing the full text feed plugin, his blog is still getting truncated at the point where he used <!––more––> tag. I got confused as to why it was happening. One reason that I found that it may be due to a cache issue and probably it’ll take some time to be full reflected in the RSS reader. However, on checking with another RSS reader, I still found his feed truncated.

So I searched Google for an answer..and found it

It’s very simple.

Just go to the Reading Option of your wordpress blog and in the Syndication feed option, choose ‘full text’.

See this screenshot :

Doing this will ensure a full RSS feed of your blog post.

I have also found a very effective video tutorial on this. Here is this video for all the newbies among you :

I hope you liked it.

If you have spent some time on Internet you must have heard about this three letters word : RSS. If you already don’t know about this useful tool for efficiently browsing the web, here is a simple introductory article which will explain everything you need to know about RSS .

OK let’s start !

What is RSS anyway ?

RSS is an acronym for : Really Simple Syndication

It is also known as : Rich Site Summary

Some people also called it : Really Simple Subscribing.

In simplest terms,

“RSS is a simple and efficient way to keep in touch with a website without actually visiting it “

Yes. To keep in touch without actually visiting !

Now what does that mean ?

Let us understand it by an example.

Suppose you are planning to set up a small garden in your house and you are in need of good information on gardening. You search the Internet for some good websites on gardening and come across a nice website with excellent contents on gardening. You find that this website has a huge collection of Gardening tips such as : How to choose the best saplings, best gardening tools, places to buy good composts, water schedule in different seasons and precautions in Gardening etc.

You realize that this informative website is filled up with so much useful information on gardening that it is impossible for you to read all the information in one sitting. So what will you do?

If you are web savvy, you will simply add the site to your favorite folder. You will bookmark the site so that you can read it later whenever you want.

Adding a website to your Favorite (in Internet Explorer) or Bookmark (in Mozilla Firefox) folder is the most preferred method to revisit a website for future reference.

However, this excellent method has some flaws in it. Extending the same example of Gardening tips websites, suppose, instead of just one website, you came across five or six excellent websites on gardening and you want to read all of them. The only solution is to add all these websites in your favorite folder so that you can select and read these websites one by one from your browser’s favorite folder. Right?

However, as you read these websites on gardening, you will find that many of these websites keep adding new articles and tips about gardening on regular basis. So in order to keep in touch with all the latest additions on these websites, you will have to visit them regularly through your favorite folder.

However, as you regularly visit these websites, you’ll also find that not all of them get updated daily. Most of them follow an infrequent updating schedule; some are updated in 2-3 days, some in 4-5 days and some on weekly/monthly basis. As all these websites are updated by their owners depending upon their own convenience, it is not possible to know exactly when a site will be updated. So you are left with no choice but to check these websites daily by actually visiting them in your browser.

Well, if you are passionate about Gardening and have lots of free time, you can afford to actually visit these important websites on Gardening on daily basis. However, practically this approach is not always possible.

What if, in addition to Gardening, you are also passionate about Home Decoration, Fishing and Muscle-Building? Can you really afford to visit all your favorites websites on Gardening, Home Decoration, Fishing & Muscle Building daily and keep track of their latest updates? Though it is always possible to do this, practical realities of life do not allow so much browsing time to most of us. We all are busy in our lives and, owing to time constraints, it is not possible to keep a track of all our favorite websites on daily basis by actually visiting them in our browser.

So what is the solution?

One solution is to subscribe to the newsletters of these websites. You must be aware that many websites publish a weekly e-zine or newsletter that contains a summary of all the latest updates made on the website .

This newsletter is sent to the subscribers on daily/weekly basis. This newsletter can be subscribed by readers using an opt-in form and every subscriber gets a copy of the newsletter in his email. So if you subscribe to the newsletter of the websites of your choice related to Gardening, Home Decoration, Fishing & Muscle Building, you can be in touch with the latest updates on these websites through their newsletter. This method is much better than daily visiting the websites using the favorite folder of your browser. As you need to check only your inbox, this results in a quick reading of all the updates.

Subscribing to newsletters/e-zines of your favorite websites is an excellent way to keep abreast with the latest updates on them. However, this method also has some flaws which can make it a bit complicated & annoying in the long run.

First of all you have to disclose your email address to the website owners for subscribing to their list. Though in a majority of the cases, the email is not disclosed to third parties, you never know when and how your email can reach to spammers which may flood your inbox with shit. The element of email misuse is always there when subscribing to a newsletter.

Secondly, as you keep subscribing to newsletters of your favorite websites, slowly you will realize that everyday your inbox is getting filled up with emails from these websites and it is taking a substantial part of your time to segregate the mails that really matters. If you are a professional and work online, a constant flood of regular emails even from your favorite websites will soon starts irritating you. Further, the task of opening every email, reading it, deleting it or shifting it to another folder will be a time consuming process in itself. If you subscribe to a list of more than 10 newsletters, you will always be involved in managing your emails. Further, if you take a break from your online activity for some time (say to spend your vacation), you should be ready to find an overfilled inbox of unread emails when you return.

In short, subscribing to newsletters of your favorite websites can also become an unmanageable task.

So is there any solution to be in touch with your favorite websites in an efficient and time-saving manner ?

Here comes the RSS.

The solution to the problems being faced by regular readers of a website in keeping abreast with its latest activities lies in a powerful technical facility known as RSS.

What actually happens in RSS is that whenever a website updates itself by means of producing an article/news item, it simultaneously produces a document that contains in itself the summary of all the updates made on the website. This document is in the form of an XML document. The ‘XML’ is a specialized language of web (similar to HTML language) which can be accessed by specialized softwares (knows as RSS Readers) that reproduce it in a readable language for the end user. The summary of the updates written on the XML document is known as a ‘Feed’. This XML document usually has an .xml extension.

So whenever somebody wants to keep in touch with the latest updates being made on a website he simply subscribed to its RSS feed. Subscribing to an RSS feed is as simple as copy & paste. You just need to copy the address of the RSS feed of your favorite website in your RSS reader. Now whenever you want to know whether any new updates has been made on a website, you only need to check it’s RSS feed in your RSS reader. If there have been any update, the same will be reflected in the feed. Simple

This way you can easily know whether a website/blog is being updated or not without actually visiting it.

RSS has some very significant advantages over the other two methods of keeping in touch with a website (i.e adding a site in the favorite folder or subscribing to its newsletter). You don’t have to save the file in your browser’s favorite folder and visit it regularly to check any new updates. As and when the site is updated, you can read it in the RSS reader. Further, you don’t have to disclose your email address to subscribe to the ezine of the site/blog. You only need to add the address of the RSS feed in your RSS reader. This ensures that you’ll never need to worry about receiving unsolicited mails in your inbox.

Let me elaborate now a bit on how to use an RSS reader. As I already explained above, an RSS Reader is a specialized software which interprets the RSS feed (written in XML language) and present it in a readable form to end user. Though there have been many online/offline RSS reader available, one of the best RSS readers is Google Reader which is fast, free and extremely reliable. There is nothing to download as the Google Reader is online. You only need a free Google account to use their reader. Just go to Google.com/reader, login into your account and add your favorite feeds. After adding the RSS feed, you will be able to read them in the reader easily. They will be listed in the form of a list just like emails in your inbox.

Alternatively here are two excellent offline RSS software which you can download and installed in your computer :

Alnera Feed Buster ( Paid $19.95)

RSS Reader (Free)

Currently a majority of all websites/blogs are coming up with their RSS feeds. If a website is not publishing its RSS feed, by all yardsticks, it is going to be obsolete very soon as RSS is slowly taking a center stage in the ways people surf the net. Everyday more and more are people are choosing RSS as their preferred way of surfing the net. And why not ? It is such a great time saver and helps us browse so many websites so quickly.

Almost all the blogging platforms of today (like WordPress, Movable Type etc) have an inbuilt feature of creating an RSS feed automatically every time the blog is updated. So the blogger does not require to create an RSS feed separately for his blog. He only needs to keep blogging as always and the feed will be created on its own.

How to find the address of any RSS feed ?

If you want to subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog, look for the following orange icon :

This orange icon has become the standard symbol of RSS and whenever someone needs to subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog/website, he only need to click on this icon to find the feed address.

For your kind information the RSS feed of this blog is :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/theindianblogger

Initially, reading various websites through their RSS feed in an RSS reader may appear a little odd to you. However, as your regularly use your reader, you’ll find that it is the fastest and the easiest method to keep in touch with your favorite websites/blogs. In our ever increasing busy life, RSS is a big time saver. If you are a heavy net surfer, you’ll soon be addicted to your reader.

So here was my attempt to explain the concept of RSS in a simple language. I think this is all you should know to have a general idea of what RSS is all about. I have refrained from explaining the technical details of RSS as I don’t think you need to know every internal part of a Car to drive it.

I would love to have your suggestions/comments on this explanation. If there is anything which needs more explanation or something which I have not covered here, feel free to mention that in your comments.

One of the most annoying disadvantage of blogging is that as you keep posting new posts some of the most useful and popular posts get buried in the archive . Except regular readers, it is almost impossible for new visitors to know about your best blog post. Since not many people are keen to search for the best content of a blog, unless we don’t make some effort to showcase our best blog posts on the front page itself , it would be almost impossible to let new visitors know about those post. This, in my opinion, is a very bad usability aspect of a blog style site.

One of the alternative to overcome this is to use the plugin ‘Popularity Contest’ which display a list of most popular posts of our blog in the sidebar. This, though helps a bit, is not the best possible solution as the popularity of a blog post is dependent upon many factors beyond our control. From my own experience, I can say that this is not the best choice to showcase our best posts.

Second alternative is to use another plugin ‘Recommend It’ which allows your blog’s veteran readers to recommend posts to first time visitors through a simple voting system. It is being used very successfully on it’s main site here

However, the best alternative in my opinion is to build your blog like a static site where all the best popular posts find a permanent place in the sidebar. I recently came across a blogger (Caroline Middlebrook) who has written a wonderful free ebook on this subject. The name of this ebook is How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress.

I read this ebook and I must admit it is a very easy to understand & effective book that explains the process of building niche sites using wordpress. Using the simple tutorial given in this ebook anybody can increase the usability aspect of his blog. If you want to make your blog easily accessible to new readers, you must read this ebook.

Ok ! As you may be aware I am taking part in a blogging challenge (which is actually is Group writing project) conducted by Darren Rowse from Problogger. Here is views/actions on tasks for day 16, 17 & 18.

Task for Day 16 : Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog.

This task is related to understand the activities of your visitors in detail while they are on your website/Blog. It actually includes using a very useful service by the name ‘CrazyEgg’ which tracks where readers of your blog click when surfing on your blog. It creates a sort of heatmap of the results.

My comments/action: I installed the script on two of my pages. I am using a free version of this service which allows tracking of only 4 pages. The results are very interesting. See these screen shots. Notice the circular Button in blue, green and red.

These results told me that visitors are searching my blog, they want to know ‘about’ me, they want to see the picture in detail and they are commenting on my posts ! wonderful ! It’s almost amazing to see so much detailed activity. This crazy Egg is a really cool thing to track your visitors activities.

Once my blog starts attracting substantial numbers of visitors, I’ll try the paid version of this service to optimize my blog. It’s a great tool .Thanks to Darren.

Task for Day 17 : Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign For Your Blog.

Ok this task wants me to run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign for my blog. It’ll costs me $5. Well though this is a very small amount, I think at this initial stage of my blog, running this campaign is not worth while. There is so little content on my blog that even if this campaign generates 100 unique visits, very few of them will stay at my blog. May be after sometime (a few months later) I run this campaign. So task completed for now.

Task for Day 18 : Create a Sneeze Page and Propel Readers Deep Within Your Blog.

This one is interesting. Here Darren has pointed towards a problem which most of the bloggers face. As we keep posting more and more articles on our blog, slowly we create a sort of database of articles. However, it is difficult for new visitors of our blog to find a complete list of all these articles. The challenge is how to propel readers towards some of the best posts in your archives. They can only see a list of our recent 10 posts or so. The archives page also dose not offer much help. This problem can be sorted out by creating a post or page exclusively for a list of all the articles of our blog. Further, if we can prepare this list category wise or topic wise then it will be very helpful for our readers.

As of now my blog has very articles. However, after sometime I’ll create a post where I’ll list my entire articles category wise. I’ll also showcase my best (I mean popular) articles in the sidebar so that they can be read by visitors.

Here one point I would like to mention is that I am not following Darren’s advice word-by-word. As my blog is comparatively new, I can’t implement all tips suggested by him. Doing so will not help my blog. However, I am noting all his tips and I know that, in the long run, I shall definitely implement them.

Hi friends,

Of late I was thinking to start blogging on this site seriously (which I was not able to do till now.) Today I came to know about a 31 days Blogging challenge which is all about making one’s blog effective & popular. I read about this challenge on a wonderful blog viz. The Bamboo Project where you can learn many things to improve your life.

So what is the challenge actually ? Well it’s not a challenge in strict sense. It’s a collaborative group task where many bloggers will write regular tips about blogging on their respective blog and post the links (of these tips) to Problogger.net which is hugely popular blog about Blogging ! Thy guy Darren Rowse who owns and runs Problogger.net is a prolific blogger who earns six figure income every year by just writing about Blogging. He is a pioneer among all those bloggers who blog about blogging. You must read his blog to keep abreast with all the new technologies as well as new monetization methods for blogs.

Darren Rowse has started this challenge which in his own word is about :

“To put it most simply – it’s a month long series of posts here at ProBlogger designed to walk you through 31 tasks that you can do to make your blog better.”

Read in detail about this challenge here

All the blogging tips are expected to revolve around following :

• finding readers
• building community/keeping readers
• monetizing a blog

So I accept this challenge and from now onwards, for one month (the challenge will last till August), I’ll be writing /commenting on various blogging tips which I have/shall learn in my online journey. I also consider this challenge as an opportunity to popularize my blog which is still a toddler in the blogging world.

I invite all of you fellow blogger to join and improve your blogging skills.