Site news: Making it easier to subscribe
by Volker Weber
I noticed quite a few visitors coming in through Bloglines. And there are only 500 something subscribers to my feeds on this service. Bloglines has a button to let visitors easily add your feed:
I have taken this one step further. There is a new Subscribe page linked from the sidebar to the right. There you can add vowe.net to a number of services.
Comments
Und was noch viel besser wäre: Alternatic noch einen komplett-feed anzubieten, damit ich nicht immer vom feedreader den browser starten muss, um den rest vom post lesen zu können. Ed hat ja auch einen ;-)
Ich weiß, dass das praktisch ist. Leider auch für die Splogger.
Schade, denn darüber würde ich mich besonders unterwegs auch sehr freuen. Der mobileGoogleReader ist nämlich echt toll!
Ich bin nicht sicher, ob es eine gute Idee ist, das Feed Icon für den Link zu verwenden. Das steht doch inzwischen allgemein für einen Link direkt zum Feed. Wie wär's mit einer zweiten Zeile "more options" o.ä. darunter?
Stimmt. Ich habe den Text jetzt mal geändert.
I don't know why, but I find it amusing when Volker's posts in English receive primarily German responses. I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all, it's just a random musing. :)
To get back on subject, I do notice that the subscription icon and text has changed in the last few hours. When I first saw this post I saw the normal RSS icon and assumed that's all it was, it's more obvious now that it's something different.
Charles, I hardly notice the difference between german and english comments. :-)
Oliver has made a good comment. He said that the standard RSS icon might confuse people into thinking this was actually the feed URL. I changed the text to an instruction in order to make it more obvious what to do with this link.
What I think you are are referring to is that I changed the color of the icon slightly to blend into the color scheme of this site. Since it still has the same name, it is being cached by most regular visitors and they will only see the difference after a while.
It's being cached? Well, what's caching to do with the color? I think you meant it's being caught? ;-)
Sometimes, even the easiest things are hard to understand.
There once was an orange RSS icon: http://vowe.net/assets/feed-icon-24x24.png
It has been replaced with a red icon: http://vowe.net/assets/feed-icon-24x24.png
As you see they both have the same name, because the red icon replaced the orange one. Your browser caches images. It does not necessarily check if an image has been replaced. Thus it may happen that you still see the orance icon, although the server has a red one.
All that effort for IE users... ;)
Firedox subscribes automatically by clicking on the RSS icon in the URL bar.
Firefox subscribes both feeds to Bloglines, Google Reader, MyAOL, MyMSN, MyYahoo, Netvibes, Newsgator or Windows Live? Now, that is cool.
Firefox 2 will be (configur)able to do so. And for 1.x there are extensions like Livelines and Feed Your Reader.
I would put some more space around the several options on your subscribe page, it seems hard to hit the correct one.
