First, let me preface this with the acknowledgement – I make a ton of blogging mistakes. A metric ton. Seriously, I know I’m the last person who should be pointing fingers; my glass house is in shards at my feet right now. But I was so frustrated Saturday night that I couldn’t NOT write this post.
I assume, as bloggers, we want readers. I mean, if I didn’t want to share my thoughts with other people, I’d keep a diary instead of a blog. We want people to read our ideas, our troubles, our ramblings and rants. We’d like them to comment, so we can reply. We comment on other peoples’ blogs for the same reason. We share link love, we tweet, we like on Facebook. Some of us (ok, not me because I’m still in the Stone Ages) even Pin posts written by other bloggers. Me? I subscribe. If I like a post of yours, or if another blogger I like links up to you, I will usually subscribe through my Google Reader.
That button up there? Andrea from Nuts and Bolts Media created it for me (thanks, Andrea!), so that people could subscribe to my RSS feed, allowing them to read my blog in their reader. You can find it in the upper right hand corner of any page on my blog. Why? Because I want people to read me! I want you to be able to subscribe to my posts, and maybe find them interesting enough to drop by, comment, link up, tweet me – heck, even if you think I’m crazy and whiny, say so!
When you make it hard for me to subscribe to your blog, I get cranky. Saturday night, I wound up really cranky! I was reading a link roundup post from another blogger in the PF genre, and there were a lot of links to blogs I don’t read. I started clicking through to the links to add them to my Google Reader. The process should be simple – click link, page opens. Find Subscription button, click. Click Google, click add to Reader. Then I have one more step, I add to the category (I read a lot of blogs, I keep my Reader organized by type). As it is, that’s 5 clicks. Not too difficult, and then I can read your blog every time you post. If I have something to say, I will click through and comment!
I was amazed by how many people either a) had no subscription button at all; b) had a subscribe by email only feed; or c) when I clicked the link, I got an RSS feed page with no visible way to add to my Google Reader (yes, there may be a way, but I need simple).
Guess what? Those blogs are not added to my Reader. I know there are other ways to add them, but I was in the process of adding almost 40 blogs on Saturday. In total, I added about 25, and 15 did not make it because there was no easy way to subscribe. And that’s too bad. They may be great blogs written by super authors, but I don’t have enough time to manually add each and every blog to my Reader. Oh, and if you use abbreviated posts in your feed and expect me to click over to your blog to read the whole post? I delete you from my reader and don’t read you any more either. Sorry I’m not sorry.
/Rant over. Thanks for reading. And for all of you who subscribe? Thank you, thank you! I really appreciate each and every one of you.
That is also very frustrating to me when you can’t just click the button and add. That being said, I’ve been at this less than a month, and it took a few weeks before I finally got my RSS working correctly. I kept getting this error saying “too many redirects?” Not even sure what that meant,but it seems to be working now. If the blog is brand new, the owner just may be dumb like me. If they have been at if for a while, there’s not really an excuse. If I can figure it out anyone can.Thanks for visiting. You’re site is really pretty. I hope to have Andrea design one for me someday.
Tech problems… I hate them! I’m so not a techie, and I get so frustrated that something that seems like it should be quick and easy takes me hours to sort out.
I can understand a new blogger not having their feed done, but a lot of the blogs I was clicking through to looked like long established blogs – lots of archives, good blog design, etc. I was just grumpy. 
I’m glad you like the blog design – I take very little credit! I told Andrea what colours I liked, she did all the heavy lifting. She’s amazingly talented!
I read that post in my Google Reader and I smiled so “I click through and comment”
One thing is when somebody doesn’t have RSS feed but, as you said, when I see abbreviated post I stop reading. I even subscribed to my own blog (even though I haven’t written anything for a long time-but it’s totally different problem) to be sure how it’s visible to everyone 
I subscribe to my own feeds too – same thing, I want to see what my readers see.
As for content, I go through phases – most of August I had terrible writer’s block; now I have a dozen ideas I’m working on, I’m just lacking time!
I’m sorry. I’m probably one of those people you are talking about.
Actually, you’re not! I’ve been following you for a while now, and your Google feed reads perfectly in my reader.
Here’s the thing… if your posts are that interesting, I’ll take the extra step to plug you into Google manually – yours are.
It does? See I had no idea! lol! I do have the continue reading feature though.
I should add, I’m know a little about wordpress, but find it pretty frustrating to figure things out sometimes, or I plan to get around to figuring things out, but my to-do list has a million other priorities. Go easy on us blog/tech challenged. Most of us aren’t thinking of how we need to make other people’s lives easier, just our own.
Oh I understand being tech challenged, trust me. Poor Andrea had a heyday working with me – I don’t even have Skype! I have a Mac I love but don’t know how to use right, anything I do in WP better be plug and play, or it doesn’t get used… I do understand.
I think, originally, when I set up my feeds (before Andrea fixed everything) it took me an hour or two to burn my feed and get my widget on my page.
I was just cranky because there were so MANY of them on Saturday! Usually it is only 1 or 2…
I’ve been playing around with my sidebars some. Even tho I’ve had my site for awhile, I haven’t figured out how to set everything up, like the RSS. I think I got it now, so if you had checked out my site, there is now a link for it. I hope it works right. I’m looking forward to having my own domain so that I can make my site better, but for now it’s still a WP.
It can be so confusing, I know! It took me ages to figure it all out on my first blog, and i still make tons of rookie mistakes here. Thanks for reading!
Funny that you got upset about that — it just makes it easier to weed out the ones I’m not going to subscribe to! I get mad about wayward apostrophes — they really grate on me.
LOL – I can understand that. My editing skills are lousy – once I type something wrong, I often can’t see it until well after it is published. I don’t mind the odd grammatical/spelling error, but blogs with habitual ones I stop reading. Too frustrating!