A must to know about RSS

As you can see my FeedCount shows that today I have 107 subscribers. Maybe this number didn’t looks great for you, but for me, it’s a big number, I’m very happy today because of this so I’ve decided to share with you some stuff I’ve learned about RSS FeedBurner and other stuff. If you want to increase your RSS subscribers than you will find this article interesting.

1. The best way to setup your RSS Feed

You probably know that the main feed for your blog usually looks like this: http://www.134u.com/feed (I use my RSS example for better understanding). But when you make an account on FeedBurner, you get a new address for your RSS, which looks like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/134ucom (what follows after http://feeds.feedburner.com/ – in my case 134ucom, is a string chooses by you when you’ve make your account). What you maybe don’t know is that the FeedCount chicklet displays only those subscribers who follow their link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/134ucom. But what can you do if you have subscribers who used your main feed to subscribe: http://www.134u.com/feed, and you want feedburner to count them? Well, you can use a great plugin, called FeedBurner FeedSmith.

The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

I’ll tell you that: for about 4 weeks, I’ve used my main feed and the FeedCount displays 0 subscribers, even if I knew that there are more. After that, I use the link from feedburner, but my FeedCount still displays 0-1 subscribers. After I’ve installed FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, the next day my FeedCount displays 35 subscribers I was happy that day, but this didn’t last. The next day it shows 25, the next day 40, than again 27… Hmmm! So I began to start some information about that feedburner, to find some explanation. And I found some in the John Chow’s articles, How I Gain 4,691 RSS Reader In 1 Month. He said that:

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. If a reader doesn’t access his feed reader for a few days, he is no longer counted even though he is still a subscriber. So the object was to get everyone to check their feed everyday.

So that was the reason why FeedCount displays such different numbers. But I’ve found also some explanation in the Darren Rowse’s article: Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate? – you should read this article, too.

Then, John Chow said that is better to attract more Email subscribers, because:

FeedBurner counts an email subscriber for as long as they can send them emails. Unlike a RSS reader, if the RSS by Email subscriber doesn’t read his email for several days, he is still counted. The only time his count stops is if he unsubscribe to the service.

After I’ve read John Chow’s article, I gave my readers the possibility to subscribe through email to my RSS feed. And also it gave me the idea to organize a contest, where the email subscriptions counts 2 points.

If you decide to deliver your RSS through email using FeedBurner, you can make some improvements:
1. You must activate your Communication Preferences service: you can do that under the tab Publicize, Email Subscription -> Communication Preferences. You can personalize the subject and the body of the email your subscribers will receive.

2. You can choose how your email will look like: you can do that under the tab Publicize, Email Subscription -> Email Branding. You can choose your own title, you can add your Logo to email, and you can change the style of your email content.

3. You can choose when your email will be delivered to subscribers: under the tab Publicize, Email Subscription -> Delivery Options:

4. You also can choose to receive an email whenever people unsubscribe from your email subscription: just go under the tab Publicize -> Email Subscriptions -> Subscription Management and check “Send me an email whenever people unsubscribe (will be sent to your “from” address).”
Under the same tab you can see the number of email subscribers and if they activate their subscription. But you can see the unconfirmed subscribers directly on your dashboard, using a great plugin: Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers. Using this plugin, you also can send to your unconfirmed subscribers an email to remind them to activate their subscriptions.

How to increase your RSS subscribers

I’ve read too many articles which explain how you can increase the number of RSS subscribers. There are many way to do this, but I want to point just some of them (and for some of these I link to those articles where you can find more information):

• Write great and on-topic content – of course, this is the default rule
• Place your RSS icon above the fold
• Offer your readers a full RSS feed
• Allow your readers to subscribe by email
• Place an RSS icon at the end of single posts
• Reward your subscribers offering them something unique: you can do this by using FeedFlare

Why readers unsubscribe from your blog?

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger wrote a very interesting article: 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog, based on his reader’s answers. On the top of reasons stays:

• Too many posts
• Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead)
• Partial Excerpts Feeds
• Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting)
• Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News)

How to subscribe to a single section of a blog

If you find a blog like My lucky number 13, with many subjects, you may want to subscribe only to those sections who interested you. So, if you want to subscribe only to the Blogging section, for example, you can use the link: www.134u.com/blogging/feed. Of course, blogs with many sections will not display the RSS links to all these (though this is something to think about), only the full RSS. But keep this in mind for further subscriptions.

36 comments November 29th, 2007

Natural hair loss treatment

Have you ever confronted with hair loss? If you do, you should know that hair loss can be caused by many reasons, like an illness or a major surgery, hormonal problems, certain infections, some medicines, child birth. Hair loss is so common that most of the time it is considered a normal variation and not a disease. While hair loss has few medical complications, there are some psychological effects associated with going bald, like to have a negative body image than those without hair loss.

There are many treatment options for hair loss, including grooming techniques, wigs and hairpieces, medications, and surgery. If you want to use a natural treatment, you can use Provillus: an all natural herbal hair loss re-growth product, very appreciated by customers who have used it. There are Provillus for men and Provillus for women, both of them containing an excellent blend of nourishing nutrients that blocks DHT (dihydrotestostrone) – a hormone recently identified to be the main cause of the hair loss.

If you want to find more about hair loss and Provillus, please visit the hair loss forums.

15 comments November 29th, 2007

Link love for my Top 13 Commentators

It’s time to get some link love to my monthly Top 13 Commentators. It is obviously my first try of this kind, so be gentle with me

1. nimrodjo has lost his blog and until he repair it or start a new one, he is inviting us to visit his other blog, Web Home Business. You will find some interesting articles in there.

2. Lady Banana has made some improvements to her blog so it loads much faster. Go visit her and check yourself what she made for this.

3. Simonne is hosting a group writing project named My Best Blogging Achievement. Go visit her and see how you can participate. There will be some winners and some prizes, too

4. pelf change her mind about selling her blog called The Giving Hands and she is looking for guest bloggers who can commit one post per week to The Giving Hands.

5. AntiBarbie, who writes some beautiful stories and poetries on her blog, don’t want you just to be kind, but to give her honest criticism about her writing. Oops! I’m just being kind?

6. Marco Richer who writes very good articles about blogging and internet marketing, received a large amount of traffic from StumbleUpon and he tell you why you should use StumbleUpon, too.

7. Liza is sharing with us a delicious recipes for Pancit Molo. I’ve never heard about this, but I’ll must try it, because it sounds Yummy.

8. SnoopyTheGoon writes about The blues of a scribe, quizzing someone.

9. Andy Bailey has a new look on his blog. He made another update to CommentLuv plugin and he promises a lot of new interesting articles.

10. Annette has a wonderful Thanksgiving Day! Visit her blog and watch some beautiful pictures

11. Sensei publish new contests on his blog. Go visit him and see if you are interested in some of them.

12. Aimee Valle tell you what option do you have if you hate your job and you want to quit.

13. Lalla Mira wants to walk in a cool way . How many of you can walk like this?

Thank you all for taking time to comment on my blog!

8 comments November 28th, 2007

WordPress database error: [Got error 134 from storage engine]

You may noticed that yesterday, for a few hours, I have an error message displayed on my blog. While I was trying to insert a text widget on my sidebar, I’ve got this message:

WordPress database error: [Got error 134 from storage engine]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘widget_text’ LIMIT 1

After that, my dashboard looks messy: there are displayed many code lines and my widget text are disappeared. I’ve got in panic because I don’t know what to do. Then, I noticed the error name: “error 134“. You got it? I didn’t know what to do first: to cry or to smile. After I calm down a little bit I’ve searched on error 134, and I find out that maybe a table has crashed on database.

So here is the solution for those of you who own the domain and have access to CPanel and database. And of course, who get this error . I wanted to add “and who has WordPress installed” but it seems that this is a MySQL error.

First of all, you must backup your database, just in case. Go in your CPanel and open phpMyAdmin. Then, select the database and under Export tab, select “Save as file”. Then Go, and save on your computer.

Now, you must repair the crashed table. In this case, if you read the second line on error message you will see that the table was wp_option. But of course, you can repair your entire table, just to be sure that you fixed all.

How to repair a table?
Select the table you want to repair, go on Operations tab and at Table maintenance choose Repair table. If the table was crashed, you will see what errors were repaired. If the table wasn’t crashed, you will see just that the table is OK.

After the table was repaired, I had to add my text widget again. And that’s all folks.

See? You can fix this error very easy, you don’t need to panic, like I do

Hope this article helps. I don’t know if I make myself clear, but if you have any question , please feel free to ask me and if I can and I know how, I’ll help you.

18 comments November 27th, 2007