Whats Your Favorite RSS Reader?
There are several choices for RSS readers out there and when I think about it, I actually use two. One is Bloglines and the other is Google Reader. There isn’t any particular reason for picking out these two RSS readers but they seem to be better to me. In my contest, I later added an additional entry method as “Subscribing to My Feed” and sending me a screenshot of it. I was surprised to see that out of the 15 readers that chose to subscribe about 3 used Google Reader and none used Bloglines. The rest of the readers used different RSS readers and I wondered what they find useful about the RSS reader that they use. In my case study post about feed duplication, I worked with 5 different RSS readers for a period of 3 weeks to examine why duplicate posts result and even though I spent so much time with those 5 RSS readers, after the case study was done, I never went back to them.
Personally, I feel that Google Reader is just plain easy to use and provides a great layout while Bloglines is great because it also has a section where you can track your Fedex, UPS or USPS packages. From time to time I also like to see how my posts look in some of the most popular RSS readers to make sure any coding errors weren’t made in the template. For example, for about the first 2 weeks of my blog’s existence, I never realized that my RSS feed displayed all broken up in Google Reader. The images were lined up on one side and the text was lined up on the other.
Looking back, I am glad that I found the error on Google Reader mainly because about 33% of my RSS audience uses Google Reader and 21% use Bloglines. I don’t know if many of you check your feeds on different readers to see if they display properly because even a small error can cause a page to look odd. For example, recently my website wasn’t displaying properly at all in Internet Explorer and after about 3 hours of searching, the cause of the error was a “div” tag that was incorrectly placed! If you blog, do you check to see if your feed displays properly in different readers and what is your preferred RSS reader?
thankfully, what you posted here i am stickler about and i have gotten it to work properly
To be honest, I visit each site that I read. It may be silly but I have always done it like that. That isn’t to say I don’t subscribe to feeds. I do it just to acknowledge that I like that particular blog. In which case, Bloglines.
Same here Brian. I go to the websites I read even though I have subscribed to them. I find it easier to visit the website than to use my RSS reader.
i use Google reader, but i think i been brain washed by Google already