Non-reason for readers to unsubscribe from feeds

Darren Rowse recently conducted an "open mic" survey to understand why people unsubscribe for a blog's RSS feed. However, looking at the results of the survey here, I feel quite a number of people had got the question wrong.

The title of Darren's post "What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?" clearly indicates that the question here is why people unsubscribe "from a blog's RSS feed" and not the blog itself. RSS feeds, according to my knowledge, are usually subscribed to through aggregators like Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader etc. These aggregators check for new content on these feeds and informs the subscriber when there is an update available.

Darren's survey shows that almost 11 percent of the people unsubscribe from feeds due to infrequent posting. Yes it would bother if you had bookmarked the blog to check for new content regularly. But why on earth would they be bothered by infrequent posting when they don't have to do anything to check for new content on that blog?

It could be that the 29 odd people would have either got the question wrong or just needed a reason to post a comment. » Continue reading

Read more on Blogging, RSS/Feeds/Syndication

Blogger features request (wishlist)

Blogger is one great blogging platform that any newbie can be comfortable with. The new Blogger is a giant leap forward from the old Blogger in terms of features like layouts, labels, post comment feeds, feeds by labels, blog security etc. However, there is lots more that Google needs to put into Blogger to make it comparable with Wordpress, Typepad and other high end professional blogging platforms. The Blogger Wishlist is not the place where I can list the features that I need on Blogger. I rather list them here so that others too can see what blogger needs badly and add to it what they feel is necessary.

Here they go...

1. Advance posts: Ability to write posts in advance of them being published so that they go live at a preset date and time.
   
2. Non-post pages: Ability to add non-post pages like about us, contact us etc.
   
3. Upload non-image files: So that CSS style sheets and external JavaScript files can be uploaded right on to the blog-spot server. There could be even more uses.
   
4. Label Archives: Instead of searching labels so that we can directly link to the particular label feed from the label archive page automatically using the auto-discovery feed links for the page.
   

This is all that I have on my mind right now. Will keep adding as and when they crop up in my mind. You too can leave your requests here. » Continue reading

Read more on Blogging