A Little Blogging Business...Google Reader 101

Hey guys...today I'm gonna stray from the main topic of the blog to talk a little about blogging itself. I'm gonna take the opportunity to pass on some lil tidbits I learned in the 3+ years that I've been doing this. I'm no expert...but I see so many new Jamaican blogs popping up all over the place and it gets me excited to have local stuff to read. There are even Jamaican blog awards in the works which can mean great things for our blogosphere. That's funny...spell check doesn't yet recognise the word blogosphere. LOL...anyway

What prompted me to write this post actually was the fact that I wasn't getting everything I wanted from many of y'all on my reader and I thought, maybe you just don't know. Heck, I just started using it this year. So what's a reader? You see the orange icon I have in the right hand column over there? The one that looks like this? (look to the right :) Well...thats a universal symbol for an rss feed. Its the mailman if you wish, its what people use to subscribe to a website and have the content delivered wherever they want. Whether email or to a reader. If you use gmail...you'll see a link at the top of the gmail page that says reader:

See it? Ya...like my theme? Anyway, if you click it, it will take you to where your subscriptions will be delivered to if you choose google reader when clicking on rss feeds. Most people I believe use google reader. I'm only guessing because most people use gmail....

I say all of that to say this. Don't syndicate only a portion of your posts! See...you can choose to publish a full feed or a partial feed...look around in the settings of your blog. If you use blogger like I do, then you will find it by clicking the settings then site feed tabs. I used to publish partial feeds because I wanted people to come to my blog...so I would give you a snippet and then try and force you to come over to read the rest. Now, I just publish ads in my rss feeds as well. Because since I am finally an rss user myself, I realise that people who publish a partial feed, I simply move on. I rarely ever click thru. Its too much work. I like having everything in one place on my reader. Besides, I mainly use my reader at work because my office has blocked all blog sites. So I couldn't click thru even if I wanted to...the site itself is probably blocked. By the way my regulars if you've noticed a drop in my normal commenting on your posts...this would be the reason why.

Many people are worried that if they publish a full feed then scraper sites will steal your content. Scraper sites will always steal your content. No matter what. I really found that the best way to do so was just to tag all your posts so that if it does end up on another site, then at least people reading it there will realise that it was originally posted somewhere else first, and if they choose to click on any links, it will still come back to my site anyway. Here is a blog post that helped me a lot when I was trying to make the decision about what to do about publishing full feeds and branding them. Publishing full feeds is point number 1! Point number 8 will tell you how to brand your feed, which you can also do under the site feed tab in blogger, in the post feed footer box.

Well...thats enough techy stuff from me. I hope it was simple enough and you took something away from it. I am available on twitter to answer any questions you may have!