Strangechord

I’ve posted here before about Bloglines, the RSS feed aggregator. (What are RSS feeds??) There’s no way I could stay on top of things without it. I read news and blogs through feeds every day, as do more and more readers out there.

I’d like to pass on two tips to bloggers to make reading their blogs through aggregators easier for people like myself:

1. Those of you with a Blogspot blog: There’s a way to “turn on” the RSS feed for your blog. Go here to follow the very easy instructions. Don’t forget to post the feed’s link on your blog! (Or post it in the comments once you’re done.)

2. Those of you with a Movable Type blog: You already automatically have an RSS feed. However, the default way each your posts shows up in a feed is as the first few lines only. We feed readers then have to click to visit your blog to read the rest of the entry. This is a pain; unless I’m really engrossed in what I’ve read so far, I will skip it and forgo reading the rest of your entry.

So, what you can do to remedy this is to fix your code so it posts the whole entry in your feed, rather than just the opening excerpt. In Movable Type, go to Templates —> “RSS 1.0 Index” and the URL is “index.rdf”. Go to the part in the code that says:

<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml=”1″$></description>

And simply change it to:

<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$></description>

Thanks everyone!