Of Blog Feeders and Readers

Yes, I confess. I've become a blogaholic. These days, 90% of my browsing time is consumed by blogs - both writing and reading them. Infact, I seem to get all my news and current affairs from blogs rather than credible news sources like my favorite NY Times. Initially, I just bookmarked my favorite blogs and kept visiting them regularly. As the number of bookmarks increased, I found it tough to keep pace with the rate at which these blogs generated new posts. I looked around for a better way of reading blogs and decided to try Google Reader. I don't know what this thing about Google is. But when you have competing products from 10 different companies/web-sites, I always seem to prefer Google. It has sort of developed this cuddly teddy bear feel and people seem to implicitly trust the company and its products. We'll probably have to revise our opinions now that Google is turning out to be a whiney cut-throat monster just like MS and Yahoo as it gets into the browser war.

Anyway, coming back to Google Reader, I found that I could add subscriptions to various blogs I'm interested in, and every morning the latest posts from these blogs are retrieved and presented to me as my Reading List for the day. Everything about this was so simple, the interface was googley neat and I could even easily share or blog these posts directly. Such tools, apparently, are called on-line feed readers. And believe me, if you're a blog junkie like me, any of these tools would drastically reduce your blog-browsing time. You can check out this post by TechCrunch a while ago if you're wondering which feed reader would suit your requirements.

Ok, now that my blog-reading requirement had been taken care of, I had another problem. I like to know how (un)popular my blog is and how many people read my posts. If you visit my page, my sitemeter (bottom of the page) would give me the statistics. But if you were to subscribe to my blog via one of these feed readers I just described, then I would have no way of figuring out my subscribers, would I? This is where FeedBurner comes into the picture.

Let's start with the basics. What's a feed? If you publish a blog, you publish a feed. A feed is the format that allows your content to be delivered (and subscribed to) on the Web. You probably have heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by now. Then there is the Atom Syndication format which is designed to be a universal publishing standard for personal content and weblogs. This is the default XML feed provided by blogspot. As the number of feeders and readers increase, there could be various compatibility issues with the atom format. So instead of relying on atom, all my feeds are now routed through FeedBurner which automatically converts my feeds into the format most suited for the feed reader you're using. So if you would like to subscribe to my feed, just click on the icon on the side bar or at the bottom of the page that looks like this or . If you're a blogger and would like to put FeedBurner on your blog, here's a nice post by Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration.

I finally managed to blogroll myself (since everyone seems to have their list of blogrollers, I'm kinda starting to feel left out!) as well as created a Flickr account since I've been wanting to share more photos (blogger allows only 300 MB of free photo hosting). More than writing posts, I seem to get tickled by finding out new toys and adding them to my blog. Unfortunately, the blogosphere is changing way too fast for me to keep up with. Its a losing battle...

But, if you are an absolute beginner considering stepping into the world of blogging, then this post is a good place to start. Well, that brings us to the end of my Blogomania - 101. If this inspires you to start blogging or improves your understanding of the blog world, well then, good for you. But if you've learnt absolutely nothing from this post, I really don't give a rat's ass. And if you thought I'm showing off my newly-acquired knowledge and skills, you're right. Tata!