Why You Should Subscribe To Your Own Feed

RSS Feeds are a great way to distribute content among your readers. Probably you are also subscribed to a number of feeds. Even i provide an RSS Feed here. You might want to subscribe to it if you haven't already. And, there are reason why you should subscribe to your own feed.

1) Problems in your Feed

Your feed may not always work as you'd want it to be. Errors can occur without your knowledge and you'd definitely want to know about it before your readers do. It is a good practice to check your post in a feed reader after posting.

2) Email Subscriptions

Again if you offer Email Subscription options for your feed, problems can occur with it too. There can be issues with mail delivery or display of content. In order to be aware of all these, you need to remain subscribed to your feed via Email too.

3) What you see is not What others see

This is a common problem with feeds and feed readers. The format in which your post is displayed on your blog is never the same as how it is displayed in feed readers. For this reason, people suggest not to use CSS Classes within posts, as they work only on your blog. I'll make a detailed post on this later.

4) Boost Your Feedcount

The feed subscriber count has become an important metric in the blogosphere. By subscribing to your own feed, you can easily increase your subscriber count without paying for it. (note : this method is illegal.. i don't encourage doing this.. i've included this point here just to increase the post length :P )

Okay, now which reader should i use ?

That entirely depends on you and your audience. If you have time, you can do it with all the possible readers that you find. But, avoid this as this would increase the feed count fakely by a large number. My suggestion is that if you use Feedburner to manage your feed, login to your account and check which reader your subscribers most use. Then, subscribe using the top two. That would be enough. And if you provide email subscriptions, subscribe using that too.

I subscribe to my own feed using Google Reader and an Email Subscription. Do you subscribe to your own feeds ? If so, using which readers ?

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