Jul9
Sick of RSS Subscription Links
You know what I’m sick of?
It’s those small, but annoying boxes bloggers are putting in their blog content that says something to the effect of:
If I want to subscribe to your feed, I know what to do. I’m kinda smart. If you’re content is so engaging that I can’t NOT subscribe (double-negative I know, but it helps the point), then I will…but its not because you suggested it. Its because you’re site has “RSS Staying Power” (new term I just coined). Its because I can learn something from your site and enjoy the way you communicate ideas and knowledge. Not because you want me to.
But begging me to subscribe or sliding a request box into your content is not the way to win my subscription. It only annoys the crap out of me.
Maybe I’m flying off the handle here, but this sort of thing bugs me. I understand the need for subscribers, especially if you have a semi-prominent blog and count on the readers to fuel your ad revenue. Readership is great, but does it really show you something? Really?
I tend to think that readership is skewed. That the actual number of “real” readers who take the time to read your site, are not represented in the number of RSS subscribers you have. A lot of people who take the time to subscribe simply will not check your site again, or it will fall into their group of “hardly read” articles in their feed reader of choice. I would venture to say, and I could be way off here because I don’t have some “super set” of data to base this off of, but I think you should take your readership numbers and multiply it by 65%. That should land you a more “accurate” number of real readers.
I too am guilty of this. I grab a feed thinking that I will enjoy it later, only to find out that maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe that particular day I was impressed with what I found, but later reads proved to the contrary. It was not a blog that had RSS Staying Power. Thus, when I got tired of seeing it, it got deleted.
So do me a solid, you three people who actually read my site…remove this ridiculous block of html if you’re a blogger and have it. You probably dont want these “every once-in-a-while” readers anyway. If you don’t want to remove it because you think it increases your RSS subscribership numbers, then move it out of the main content section of your articles. How about on the sidebar where it belongs?
Here in Oklahoma, you come to expect crazy weather changes. It’s just something that you accept after living here a while. Today was no exception.
There’s something that’s aggravated me for quite some time. It’s the simple fact that people, for the most part, don’t use their blinkers when they drive. When I’ve traveled anywhere in the US, it’s been my discovery that this problem is not just localized to my area, but I just see so much of it that it drives me crazy.
Going into last night’s NFL game, I thought for sure I had locked 2nd place…quite nicely even. My opponent still had two players left to play both of which usually scored in the teens. This alone would have beat me.
This year’s Ice Storm has sucked…and I mean sucked big time. There were at one time almost 800,000 customers in Oklahoma without power. In December, that’s not a good thing.
We’ve been without power since sometime around 2am Monday morning. Since the in-laws have a gas generator, we’ve been staying in their house where the furnace is running at a good 71°.
I’d really like to be home during the day, cleaning up the house, fixing little problems that this ice storm has caused but alas I sit at work from sun up, to sun down.
With this whole power outage experience it seems quite odd to me that we’d actually have people out there who are lighting up their Christmas lights, as if to say “Screw you guys…I’ve got POWER!” This just doesn’t set well with me. With heaps of people without power, you actually have the audacity to not only enjoy your heat, but to gloat about it by “Clark Griswold’ing” your neighborhood.