Manage Your Blog Comments Using RSS

Thanks to Connected Internet’s recent post on increasing blog comments, I added a site-wide Comments RSS feed for my RSS/Atom users. Now, when you leave a comment on my site, you will be notified about any and all replies without having to visit the specific post you commented on again. This is a great feature since I often leave comments on other blogs, but have no efficient way of tracking any replies to my thoughts. With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), communication between people gets a lot easier.

RSS Is Your Friend

Everyone should use RSS because it saves you tons of time, and drastically reduces the need to manually type-in URL addresses. Your favorite sites should already have RSS feeds, even if you didn’t know about them already. By using Google’s feed reader, I can selectively browse through hundreds of articles, picking the ones that interest me. On average, I check up on over 40 sites daily in less than 30 minutes. Most of that time is spent actively reading the posts. Just imagine if I had to type-in 40 different web addresses, and then search for newly updated content. That would be a waste of time and bandwidth!

I suspect a lot of my readers already utilize RSS , but for those who haven’t tried feed readers, you are probably wasting a considerable amount of time by browsing the old fashion way. So, start saving time (and money), and join the web 2.0 revolution.

Recommended Feed Readers

• Google Reader – Google offers the best feed reading capabilities hands down. I highly recommended their aggregation services.
• Bloglines – Very capable feed reading service. Only #2 to Google IMO.

I’ve only used Google and Bloglines for RSS services, but there are plenty of other aggregators out there as well. Try searching Google for “rss reader.”