I’m not sure about all of you, but a good number of you must follow the feed from a bunch of different blogs. When a new article/whatever comes up in my feed reader, I’ll follow the link to open it up in my browser to read it on their site.
There are a lot of blogs out there, and just as many different ways of putting a link to one’s feed. Historically, it’s been in a predictable location near the top or bottom of the page; however, you get some pages where the feed just can’t be found.
Usually, the feeds for good blogs are in good places, so there’s not much problem.
There’s a site called Avalonstar, which I’m sure you’ve heard about. The site has won design awards, so you had better know about them. I was on there a while ago, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, find the link to their feed. After half an hour of searching, I was sure they didn’t have one, and decided that I’d read their more current entries as I stumbled onto their blog (it’s bound to happen).
I came across it again today, with a bit more knowledge under my belt. Here are some simple hacks to get someone’s feed:
example.com/?feed=rss2
example.com/blog/feed
example.com/blog/rss
And so on. I tried some of those, but none worked. I finally realized that they might have a feedburner account, which isn’t advertised on their site. I searched for it on the feedburner site, and there it was.
So… Moral of the story: Put your feed in an easy-to-see spot. Some people WILL want it, and you might lose them as readers if it’s not available.