Editorial
RSS, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways…
otou-san’s nifty guide on RSS and the varied responses it garnered from commentators got me all curious about the percentage of our readers subscribed through our RSS feed — or more like the ones who are not subscribed, rather, impossible as it may seem that people are still not seeing wonders of RSS!!11!! Silliness aside, I know people have their own reasons for choosing to rely on aggregators such as AnimeNano, or for the hardcore readers — rely on their skillz to manually visit their favorite blog every [insert set visiting interval here]! But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share my own thoughts about the advantages that subscribing to RSS brings. And a friendly warning/disclaimer, this post is Google Reader biased.
1. I Can See Dead Blogs and Posts
The heading says it all, if you’re subscribed to an RSS feed, you’re sure to access the site during downtimes, even when the blog becomes dead or deleted! Even deleted posts won’t escape your sight. Awesome right? For readers, that is. Because for bloggers who want to erase something they’ve written on the interwebz, well, sorry to say but you can’t, not unless Google dies together with your cached data. Once it’s published, it’ll be there. Forever.
Lelangir’s blog, for example, has undergone quite a number of death and revival “cycles”, and if you’re subscribed to his blog’s feed in Google Reader (I’m not sure about the persistency of feeds in the case of other feed readers/fetchers), you won’t have to worry about his future decision to delete/undelete the blog because his posts will right in your Google Reader inbox, available for your reading pleasure.
Still not convinced about the “you can see dead blogs” I’m talking about? Well then, let’s try a little experiment, shall we? We all know that Os’s old blog Karoshi as well as jpmeyer’s あいとゆうきのおとぎばなし are long dead, right? While it may be true that you can no longer access their sites/posts directly, Google Reader allows access to their feed (thanks to the Great Google Cache), which means you can see their posts come alive if you know their blog feed’s URL and subscribe to it (though of course in the case of jpmeyer this isn’t a big deal since he imported his posts from the old site to the new one)! Here’s the feed URL for both Karoshi and あいとゆうきのおとぎばなし, if you feel like trying this out, to prove me right. I also tried this out with Wrex’s Anime Whirls and Helspectre’s blog, just for the kicks. You can try it out with other sites that disappeared from the face of the web, if you feel like reminiscing the good old days when they were still alive.
If the blog don’t offer full feeds however, you’ll only see the snippets of their posts, which means you still have to visit the site to read it in full. So if the blog is already dead or the specific post has been deleted, well, sad to say but you can no longer [fully] read it. Moral of the story (for bloggers)? Provide full-feeds, for posterity!
2. Unblock the Cockblockers! Images not included.
Simply put, you can read posts from blogs and other sites, even if they’re blocked by your cockblocker network administrator through Google Reader (again, I’m not sure how other feed reader fetch/synchronize the feeds, so I’m just going specific here, on the reader where I tried and tested this). This is particularly useful for those who read blogs at work, school, or other places with secure/strict network policies. The images uploaded in the blocked sites, however, will still not be visible in your feed reader since that would have to be fetched from the site itself.
And yet again, this will only be an advantage if the blog offers full feeds, otherwise you’d still have to visit the site to see the rest of the post. But since the site is blocked, well, boohoo you still can’t read it. Feel free to use a proxy site and hope your net ad won’t catch you red-handed.
Do take note however that you might run into image-loading problems with blogs that have hotlinking protection enabled (and not disabled for the feeds), and you’ll see this “NO HOTLINKING” image plastered all over the posts 
— one of the disadvantages of subscribing through RSS; not like that can stop you from going RSS, right? Right?
3. Avoiding Bad Design Like a Plague
Admit it, there are sites out there which tick you off with its aesthetic unpleasantness and activate your “design elitist” genes — the ones that make you wanna scream “OMGZ YOUR SITE DESIGN SUCKS BUTT”. Now if you don’t want to get distracted by the ‘horrendous’ theme design (that you yourself labeled), then do yourself a favor by subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed so you can read it in your feed reader instead — simple and clutter-free. Minimalists will surely opt for this.
Again, this will only happen if the blog offers full feeds (I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, but this just goes to show how much advantage full feeds will give); otherwise you’d be left with no choice but to visit the blog and put up with its fugliness. Poor you.
4. Oh Notes!
The notes feature of Google Reader was brought to my attention by feed crazy Ryan, and it’s not until recently that I started getting into the habit of blog post note-taking. This goes hand-in-hand with otou-san’s helpful tip on how to use Google Reader to follow comments, with the latter allowing your Reader to act as a Breadcrumb application of some sort, as you’ll be able to keep track of your “commenting trail” in the ‘sphere, and the former for writing scribbles and notes about the post — either why/how it compelled you to comment, or anything else about it that you found rivetting, or other sentiments you may have about it — taking “tagging” one step further, in a way (omg long sentence is longgg).
Both of the aforementioned tips are a godsend to me, since I’ve been meaning to find a way to keep track of remarkable posts I run into, for future reference, or for future commenting (since there are posts which are ZOMG AWESOME, leaving you starstruck and unable to churn out an insightful comment in a whim).
5. Let’s Zoom In!
Time for a little personal narrative.
Back in the day, I never thought I’d find much use for RSS feeds, or aggregators for that matter, since I was an egotistic blogger who was far too engrossed in my own blog to bother about the whole blogosphere.[1] The moment I finally decided to stop being lazy and discover the anime community out there, I relied on Anime Nano and Animeblogger antenna, and found them pretty neat, as they provide you with this “wide angle view” of the blogosphere – the horde of blogs out there, the latest buzz, trends, and issues that you shouldn’t miss out on.
I hate being out of the loop, especially with riveting topics that I want to piggyback on, knowing well that I would’ve contributed some insights in the whole discourse (if I’m not being lazy). But I digress.
Despite how aggregators provide a convenient means to keep in touch of / reach out to the anime community, at one point I just felt it wasn’t enough. I wanted to get closer not only to the “community”, but the people / bloggers who make up this community in the first place. I looked for a way to “zoom into” the bloggers, and Google Reader did just that — now I have the anime community, right at my fingertips. All that’s left to do is to stop procrastinating and get into reading their posts, and participate in ongoing discussions.
Like Kabitzin, I never thought I’d find much use for RSS feeds, until I finally started using Google Reader to keep track of blogs, and has then become an indispensable part of my geeky otaku life.
UPDATE:
6. Be More Social, Share.
omg how could I have not included this! Thank you lolikit for reminding me about this.
The notes feature mentioned above, is one of the ways you can get more “social” with Google Reader, and it all boils down to one thing — sharing (or “pimping”). You can share notes, in connection to a post that you want to pimp to your friends (in Google Talk), for whatever reasons. And this turned out shorter than I expected, oh well.
…and that’s basically it for my so called “testimonial”. Feel free to add to this list, the more RSS testimonials, the better (better chances of converting more people too! 
)!
If you remain unconvinced to take advantage of feeds after reading this post, well I still hope you guys will drop by and continue to read our random babblings. Now if this post actually did convince you, I suggest taking a look at otou-san’s RSS guide (for those who still haven’t seen it, or have no idea how to go about using Google Reader), and I can only hope that you’ll add us in your feed reader — if you deem us worthy that is. Earning a spot in your reader = earning a place in your heart, after all (whether that’s good or bad only you can tell). Oh gawd this is getting cheesy, have to end this before it gets worse.
Hope you learned something from this, at the very least :3
Toodles! 
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30 comments for “RSS, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways…”
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I use Feedreader. I must be losing out. RSS feeds are important ever since I got more actively involved in the community though, so, so long as I can keep tabs on the blogs I visit and stuff, that is good enough for me. Screw bad design though lol.
#3 especially applies to my blog. Oh yeah.
Anyway, RSS is awesome and not just for reading. It’s great for sending information between sites
I really should start using google reader.
I’m still an old fart and I check websites every single day rather than having feeds delivered to me even though pretty much every site I visit has RSS enabled on it lol
These are the ones that should join the military ASAP… how can one have that much time!? edit: I guess that’s hinano ~_~ l33t time-haxor
Feeds are a time-saver, and it’s wide-spread, so cutting corners around the net can happen almost anywhere with aggregation.
Even though feeds have been by my side since, I guess RSS 2.0, I never thought I’d seriously use only Google Reader, but I haven’t use a desktop app since. Of course I love the noting*, but the _star_ feature is rather nice as well.
I dislike having 400 unread feeds especially since I know they are on things I’ve not watched but still want to see so-and-so’s perspective later. Stars help, and I’m down to 22 unread items, only 4 of them have something to do with out blogosphere ^_^
… that felt like an infomercial D:
Love the pics and the pitch Jen
Glad to know you’re hearting the sphere with Reader’s nice feature-set.
Cheers
*btw, I wrote a pingback service which attempts to ping the article in which a note was placed, thus alerting the author. I may post on that sooner or later.
It’s funny, I added my first blog’s feed to google and tada, I can see all those posts, which weren’t too long ago compared to other bloggers out there. [I can't see the comments/pictures though since I guess the database was erased.]
I should try out the note-taking thing, though I can’t see myself using it right now, I might start using it and end up loving it.
As opposed to RyanA, I kinda like having a billion unread posts in the reader. It takes like, less than a minute to skim through the titles since I know I’m only going to read a few of them, and sometimes I end up reading a post from a site I usually don’t visit, like random posts at j1mone. Generally, I don’t read by the author.
As powerful as Google Reader may be, it lacks one key feature that I would have wanted tremendously - the ability for “saved keyword search within subscriptions”.
Say for example, I like Toradora. So I want to search within my subscriptions all the posts which mentioned the term “Toradora”. My favorite keywords would show up at the Google Reader sidebar for easy access similar to my subscriptions/tags, and it updates me whenever new posts have some “Toradora” in it.
Hung’s Anime Nano has the closest thing to that functionality, because he provides separate feeds for specific anime series names. But how about specific interest terms like ’shoujo’, ‘touhou’, ‘r0ri’ or whatever?
And as an incomplete implementation, I actually have this kind of functionality in the Opera browser. I can save search terms, and it will automatically search within my subscribed feeds checking the new posts and informing me that something may be of interest in that blog since he/she mentioned ‘whatever’ keyword. Unfortunately of course, my Opera won’t have the awesome Google Reader archive of old posts, just in case I wanted some nostalgic read.
Google Reader has a search bar over at the top, but at least I want my search terms saved for convenient re-use.
i should give this a try. to bunch up all the blogs i read (non-anime ones), i mean. for aniblogs, i just pretty much rely on animenano.
Also, reading from Google Reader looks more professional than having sites splash up with tons of eyecatching images. People just assume you’re reading news or email if you stop it right after all the text loads.
Of course, if they analyze traffic, you’re screwed but oh well.
I generally unsubscribe from partial feeds. I’m not alone either - I’ve seen a lot of bloggers who blog about blogging recommend full feeds as well. I figure it’s their loss.
@bluemist, it’d likely not be a difficult issue for a Greasemonkey script, but I’m not sure what Opera does for that sort of thing. Also, animenano, while it does match posts with series, I think it suffers the same issue with the ab antenna, in that it does not handle all instances well and relies on the blogger to do proper tagging/categorizing.
Really, the best sort of post-connecting I’ve seen is on last.fm … but, I think keyword searches in Reader have greater range.
I guess I better get the RSS thingy set up.
BTW, is the last pic Misao from Lucky Star?
I already use my google reader and RSS in general to the point of abusing it, but somehow I’d completely forgotten about notes since I first started using google reader and had to run off to check it out.
But yes! More people need to get and start abusing their own google readers. I know it’s made me read some great posts I’d normally overlook because it’s the only new post in my reader at the moment. It’s good for the blogosphere that way too I suppose.
RSS is really convenient, not only does it mean I can quickly check news, blogs or whatever I like but I don’t have to bookmark things and remember to visit ^_^ Although it’s too convenient, right now I swear I’m subscribed to way too many…
Problems I have with it is sometimes images don’t show up there and also its too good a time waster- I can’t be the only one to spend ages hooked to my feeds? LOL (I’ve still got like 300 unread o_o ) I wish you could sort starred posts into categories too (unless you already can and I just haven’t noticed how)
Lastly I do find it scary that old blog posts are kept there. I try to show full because summaries are annoying and pointless if you only want to quickly read something without visiting the site, or if the site is unreadable. But at the same time I delete things for a reason either because they are totaly rubbish or I’ve decided it’s to personal. Yet to know they are still accessable is worrying…
@Panther: Based on the comments of people in otou-san’s post, Feedreader seems to be the “norm”, perhaps those who are paranoid / don’t want Google taking care of their feeds? But yeah, Reader has lots of features you can exploit, and of course it’ll just get better ^^
@lk: thanks for reminding me of the “social/sharing” aspect of Reader! And, like Panther said, screw bad design lol.
@hinano: …you are so hardcore!
Well glad to see that you gave Reader another chance! Hope you have a blast with it.
@Ryan: Oh star feature, why haven’t I taken advantage of you yet lol. And this post is pretty much an infomercial too, it screams “I’m a Google Reader True Believer!”
Thank you for your kind words, you are an inspiration btw (hurray for geeks XD). Also, I just got pinged by your note! amazing.
@lelangir: …did you just delete your blog, again?!
Anyhow, it will be great if note-taking will proliferate, so we’ll have this pool of “Author-tans” in and out of the blogosphere lol. Need more friends in Google Talk for that, though.
@bluemist: Opera was the first one I used to keep track of feeds, but yeah, the lack of archiving is a major downfall. Would be great if Google Reader will have the nifty keyword search feature, and with the power of suggestion, I’m pretty positive we’ll see that additional sooner or later (hurray for Open communities!) Though as Ryan has said, perhaps a greasemonkey script would be the other way around that, hmm
@bianks: you just have to start using it to see its wonders!
@Caitlin: We didn’t offer full-feeds before, and it’s all because of that silly notion that if people read at the comfort of their feed readers we’ll lose traffic lol. I’ve come to delight in having more subscribers than whatever [random] hits now
And yes, all blogs should provide full feeds!
@animekritik: by all means yes, go RSS! And yes it’s Misao :3
@FuyuMaiden: Can’t agree more *high five*
@Catherine: I know what you mean about it being “too convenient”
Well, that’s what the tags, notes, star, etc feature are for! Allows you to filter through the feeds, sort them by priority and stuff.
About sorting starred posts into categories… hmm… how about adding tags to the posts, that can probably be the solution you’re looking for. Don’t be pressured by the unread posts, one “mark all as read” is all that’s needed to clear you of that lol.
You should be more careful of posting from now on then, knowing well that you can’t undo what you publish on the net
I do subscribe to blogs but not many. I tend to just come back to the sites. I have a pretty good memory of where I was at and which site it was. Tho there are sites that I do subscribe to!
I know not of this Googal Radar you talk of, nor RSS. There is, however, this nifty orange thing in the corner of Mozilla Firefox that lets me see posts without even heading to the page! Cool huh?
Oh dear God. I was an early (well, as soon as I heard of it) RSS adopter, first using Mozilla Thunderbird and shifting to Google Reader shortly after. Of course, I’m a google nerd — I use gmail, google calendar, google reader, and everything. I remember, a year before Google Talk premiered, I had a conversation with a friend where we both said it was inevitable they make a chat client, and we’d both love it. Well, I *do* love it, but no one I know uses it.
Anyway, sorry about that. I wanted to ask if you’d go into more detail on this “breadcrumb” stuff. Sometimes (like if my parents woke me up by sending me a text — grr) I’m too tired to understand things unless they’re spelled out, and it sounds really interesting. How do I do it in g-reader?
@Maura: visiting sites isn’t much of a problem… until you find yourself wanting to be updated on a horde of blogs!
@Omisyth: bahahaha, I see what you did there!! I’d be totally LMAO if you quoted that from someone who said it seriously
@Cuchlann: I use Google Talk!! And, a rare few people lol.
As for the “breadcrumb”, otou-san provided the link to his instructional video about it on his post. It basically involves tagging the posts you commented on (with ‘commented’, for example), through the ‘add tags’ option at the bottom of the post in g-reader, so that you can keep track of ‘em.
You can also opt to use the Notes and star feature as another means of breadcrumb-ing
Old fart here. And the problem with being an old fart is that eventually you will lose track of the sites you are following.
@The Sojourner: what are you waiting for, get your old fart butt into Google Reader now, it’s not too late to be “young”!
This is a very nice post about RSS with a mix of anime pics and such. This is really useful and thanks for the article! Keep it up!!
First off, thanks for even remembering Karoshi. When I read that part, I felt pretty damn good. Even some tears almost welled up.
I was just talking with theBigN earlier today and he brought this to my attention. With that said, that’s pretty brilliant. I really wish I didn’t use the “more” tag because I would love to see the rest of some things and get some of my comments back (you know, gold for us bloggers).
@Naruto Episodes: I don’t know if you’re some random spammer given your nickname, but if you’re not, thank you for reading and for finding it useful!
@Os: I never got to read Karoshi, actually, which made me glad that at least I can get a glimpse of it with this *sniff* I’d love to see the rest of the posts too. Make sure you backup the wordpress database next time!! =D