Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

This article explains why an RSS feed is important to bloggers, and some options for making it available.

Previously, I've described how to hide the Subscribe to Posts (atom) link that appears that the bottom of the screen on all Blogger's standard templates.

This is a sensible thing to do, because the link:

• is ugly, 
• is hard to find (except for hardened Blogger users who know what they're looking for), and 
• uses words ("atom") that don't mean much to many readers, especially ones who don't use Blogger.

But providing an RSS feed for your blog is A Very Good Thing to do, and there are many ways of doing it which don't involve that link.

Why is an RSS feed a good thing?

When websites were invented, people found that it took a lot of time to visit all their favourite sites regularly just to check for any changes.   It was frustrating for sites that don't change often.  It was hard to spot changes in big sites.   And web-site owners realised that some people simply wouldn't remember to check back anyway.

A few approaches were created to solve this problem.  One is RSS ("really simple syndication"), which is based on the idea that

• Websites are set up so that every time they are updated, they "publish a feed" of what's new, and
• People who are interested in websites use "feed reader" software to check if the sites they are interested in have new material, and
• Feed aggregator tools sit in the middle and keep track of what websites have published and what sites individual people are interested in what updates they have read so far.

Blogs that are made with Blogger are really just another type of website, so to work with RSS they needed a way to "publish a feed" of new material when posts are added.

The approach that Google originally used for Blogger involves "Atom" format.  The "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link that appears on the bottom of most Layout and Designer templates is saying

 "Here's a link for your feed-reader to use, in our Atom format".

This works, but as I've said, it's ugly and not so obvious for non-Blogger-users.  The rules used to publish feeds on the internet have developed over time and different ways of organising the data in "feeds" (eg Atom 2.0, XML) have been adopted.  And website publishers have begun to look for more features in their feeds and in the statistics they get about who reads them.

Blogger also has a a Subscription-links gadget, which has buttons to let users subscribe to either your Posts or your Comments.  Recently I've had difficulty with this gadget:   I can add it, but it doesn't actually show up on my blog.   I've reported this via the Something-is-broken section of Blogger Help Forum, but not found a solution.