RSS aggregators and feeding frenzies

I don't even have an RSS feed yet, unless you count the LiveJournal RSS feed (Addergoole is on a non-blogged site, just straight HTML, and I use LiveJournal as an updater for my still-on-LJ-friends).

~Lyn, behind the times.

I've got my RSS feed primarily through Feed Burner. Other than set things up on the site so that people can subscribe to the feed, I haven't done much else with it.

Drupal sets up RSS feeds automatically--almost TOO many! I know that you can monetize your feeds by putting ads into them via PW, but I haven't ever done it. I've used other people's feeds to aggregate, but haven't done much else.

Ditto on Drupal. I've yet to do anything substantial with feeds yet since it's been prioritized behind other concerns, but it's coming. Back when I was on Blogger I used Feedburner for RSS and it worked very well. Unfortunately I don't use RSS myself to read anything so I'm not sure what the big deal is other than a few general things I've read. I like to visit websites one by one and interact and such. I know RSS is important, and actually serving PW ads on the feed would probably help to figure out how many people are using the feed.

I've seen some differing opinions amongst web serialists whether to put full chapters in the feed or only portions. The general worry is that readers who get the whole thing fed to them won't come and interact on the website, or do reviews, or give us $$$. I'm not really sure where I stand on that since, well, I don't really here back from many RSS readers! Maybe we should get a survey going, and those of us who do RSS can put it on the RSS feeds, and then we can find out what RSS readers want?

It surprises me that people are working out of drupal rather than WordPress.

I like the idea of Google Pipes, where you serve up filtered feeds from more than one blog. But haven't tried it out myself.

One thing sort of tangential to the "titles vs x words" thing is that if you are relying on RSS to fetch people, and showing them the first 200 words or whatever, there's a real need to hit 'em fast and hard. I rewrote two chapters before I figured that out. What the feed was showing was not only dull, but misleading. So now I try to have nudity and gunfire in the first 200 words of everything

Drupal is over-represented here because a large cluster of the current members are hosted on the DigitalNovelists.com service, which is my project, and which is 100% Drupal. I've been a professional Drupal-only web developer for about five years now, though I've deliberately cut back to only one non-weblitty client. And then there's Irk and Char. They're unaffiliated with DN, but somehow ended up on Drupal, too.

Myself, I give the titles and nothing else in my feeds. If I could monetize the feeds via PW or some other advertising service, I might give out the whole story, but I'm not inclined to. Most of the people I know don't actually read in RSS; they use RSS as a notifying service that something they want to read is up on a site. I would imagine that a user survey on one's individual site would give better information on how one's own readers are actually using it. Once I come out of hiatus I will probably do just that.

Ah... the Drupal connection. Interesting.

Giving out the whole story is pretty drastic. I think the choice is mostly beween just the title and title with 200 or 100 or whatever word count.
The idea that having ads in the feed would indicate showing more is interesting. I guess doing an A/B test of some kind would indicate if it works.

Actually, I'm getting the impression that most people here are like myself, using RSS and AJAX or whatever, but not very invested in investigating it and power-using it.
Makes sense.

Maybe the next person in the door will have more to say on this.

(How does drupal feed? AJAX? Feedburner? It's own widget?)

Anybody using third party widgets for posting their feed?

I'm a big fan of promoting on the ning.com network of networks, by the way. And one thing they have that is way cool is a readymade RSS area where you just plug in your URL and choose how many to show. And pow, you've got a feed right there on your own page (similar to your profile on MySpace or whatever).

@MeiLinMiranda WE LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!

Also, I am inherently attracted to the piece of software most likely to make me scream with rage whenever I try to bend it to my will. Drupal is a safe and easy way to keep me from bottling up my rage until I explode and take out a neighborhood block with the sheer force of my fury a la Dragonball Z. It helps that when it DOES do what I want it to do, it's amazingly powerful software with an impressive feature set.

(following up...)

KAT AND MOUSE uses Blogger via its own domain. I set it up that way primarily for my own ease of use and I tweak it accordingly when needed.

I use Feedburner both for RSS and email subscribers. No monetizing via feeds yet, but I do add a footer to each feed that 1)directs the reader back to the web page to post comments, 2)offers them the option to support the site, and 3)provides a link to news and updates about the site and the story.

So far, my biggest numbers related to feeds has been via email subscribers. RSS subs I'm still trying to get a hold of. The reporting through Feedburner puzzles me a bit and I'll admit I haven't really read up too much on it. Maybe if there was a way to tie things to Google Analytics. Or an equally easy to use RSS analytics reader or somesuch.

And I put the full installments on the feed. True, it cuts into my site visit numbers. But I'm mainly interested in getting the story to people and if RSS is the way they want to receive it, okay by me. Same with email subs.

I use blogger and feedburner but as far as anything goes I am just whistling in the dark - what I know about technical could be written on the back of a postage stamp! I am hoping to learn from everyone here

I found the feedburner statistics easier to decipher before it was taken over by google.

The opinion on an internet business site I visit is that monotizing feeds could backfire because people resent it.

On the other hand, these guys call sendiing a mailing for new product to your mailing list that ordered other products "spamming".

I've been curious if anybody has found that to be the case.

Or is filthy rich from the inflow of feed ads.

Lin, Drupal has its own feed generator. And when I say it can make a feed out of anything on the site, I'm not kidding; it will slice and dice your content like you wouldn't believe. Here's a sample.

Whoa! That's pretty damned impressive. Having all that filering/selection would be a decent reason for doing the Drupal thing. (It wasn't REALLY named after the drag queen, was it?)

Especially for somebody heavily into the RSS. When I first figured out what RSS is i was blown away. I envisioned jukebox sites dealing out daily rations of lit.
And that could still happen, is happening, maybe.

And with that setup, that way of feeding out would be really valuable.

Drupal != Rupaul

It's a weird twisting of a Dutch word for "droplet," if memory serves.

I don't know that aggregation (what you're talking about) is that popular any more. Most people use feed readers or aggregate on a Google or Yahoo page. I think. It'd be interesting to, yes, run another survey.

I think perhaps I'll start a topic for a community-wide survey. I can host it here and we can all point to it and share data.

Huh, so am I the only person who actually regularly uses an RSS reader? Guess I'll talk about how I use it (since I did nothing to set up my own RSS feed besides tell it not to give out full content... I'm not even sure whether it's just title or title and partial content).

I was amazed and delighted when I first figured out how to use Google Reader. I love not having to remember when blogs update and go to each one individually. It's even better for blogs that update irregularly--I'm guaranteed to only look for content when there is some! I read quite a few blogs these days, so it's convenient to have them all in one place--or five places, as the case may be (I have five categories of varying importance, so if I have less time I can check only the most important/interesting ones). I don't have to click around a lot. I just go to one site and it says "here are your blogs/blits of the day!" It's very cheerful that way.

It's great for weblit as well, for the same reasons. I don't think any of the blits I read have full content in the feed, but even if they did, I would go to the site page to read them, because I prefer it that way--it's just a way of letting me know the site has updated. Lyn, I actually have an Addergoole feed from the LJ in my Google Reader; it's probably ridiculous since I have an LJ and could just follow it there, but I just prefer having all my weblit in one place!

There's one blog I read that has ads in its RSS feed, which I find pretty annoying, but the posts are also short and the ad takes up half again as much space as the text, if not more. I also like to be able to have smooth scrolling without interruptions so I don't have to take my hands off my knitting needles too often while I read, but that's just a personal quirk!

Lin, I see where your aggregation idea is coming from and I do kind of like the idea--but it wouldn't work for me personally. I like to read the whole of a story before I subscribe (as I'm sure many others do!). So if seven stories had one RSS feed, I'd have to read story one, then story two, etc., and by the time I got caught up with story seven stories one through six would have updated a bunch more times that I wouldn't have read (because I wouldn't have subscribed in the meantime, you see), so it would take me probably a few more weeks to get caught up with everything and subscribe.

I don't have any idea how to use RSS. MeiLin tells me that it's turned on for my site, but that's all I know.

Monetizing? Subscribing? Durrrrrrrrrrr.

The main feed for each DN site is at:

http://[yoursubdomain].digitalnovelists.com/rss.xml

But what do I DO with it?

Make it available to people who want to read in you their RSS readers.

Exactly.
To me, the feed is the real power of blog-driven writing.
It's a subscription, delivered the their "door" (to evoke a comparison to newspapers: home delivery compared to going down to the newstand).

If you use a desktop like Yahoo of MSN, you see all the little CNN headlines and weather and what Paris Hilton is doing or whatever...all RSS feeds. Yours can be there to.'
Or they get mail everytime you post a new episode. Or see it on your social network profile. Or whatever.

The point is, it's an incredible outreach for your writing and the more you use it and play up to it, the more readers you can get... and keep.

If you have friends, relatives, and fans who say they read your site, get them to subscribe... it's in their face that way, can get to be a habit like reading comic strips.

I don't know how Drupal works, but if I were you I would find out what it takes to flash your feed.

Just link to it; put "RSS" in your menu with a link to your feed.