Teen Web Developer, The life of John Mathews!

Hello everyone,

I am starting to notice just how important RSS feeds can be to a website. I took a look at my most viewed pages earlier, and noticed that the feed section was on the top 2 or 3 most viewed pages. Meaning a lot of people have at least been interested in following the blog.

RSS feeds have started to sky rocket to importance with the huge burst of bloggers. A RSS feed lets a reader see the basics of a blog post, site update or what ever you add to your feed. This is done by a RSS feed reader, almost all major companies (yahoo, google, msn) have web portals that you can create your own homepage with any and all your favorite RSS feeds, news sources and more.

Lets face it a lot of people are forgetful and lazy, I say that being fully guilty of both. But the ease of seeing the updates of their favorite blogs, sports teams, stocks all on one pages is easier for anyone.

I noticed once I made a blog post I had 50% more traffic than the day before where I hadn’t posted. Meaning I had a bunch of rss feed subscribers see my blog was updated and were at least a little curies and took a minute to pop in and take a look.

Any website should have an rss feed. Mainly Forums and Blogs, most blogging and forum software automatically create any and all your rss feeds you could ever need.

Even if you run a html website you can create a rss feed using html to rss a free php script that takes your html page and creates a .xml rss feed than anyone can subscribe to it with a rss feed reader.

If you have windows vista, you have a feed reader tied into your sidebar, personally I don’t like it but if you have your desktop open a lot and not crowed with 100s of windows like mine take a look at it, it’s the easiest way to view rss feeds right away.

If your on xp and you’d like to read rss feeds on your desktop take a look at google desktop it is a lot like vistas sidebar but ran by google. I honestly liked having it on my old laptop.

- John
- Teen Web Developer