Re: Re: Reading Indie Blogs Right
Well, this is some chain of posts. This morning, I opened my RSS reader to read some of the new posts I missed over the past few days. One of the posts was Re: Reading Indie Blogs Right by Yordi. I’ve subscribed to Yordi’s blog for a few weeks now, and frankly I don’t even remember how I found it.
His post was actually a reply to another post that is itself a reply to another post. This whole chain of posts and debates was about how to read indie blogs right – whether you should subscribe to their RSS feeds or just visit their websites.
As Yordi puts it:
There is so much enchantment in taking that little extra effort to open a post on someone's website.
I totally agree, and I will also add two things to that little extra effort I try to do to keep the magic alive:
- Take a quick tour: If I encounter a new blog (usually through discovery feeds like Bear’s Trending Posts), I take a quick tour of the website. I check out the design, the pages in the main site, and how it was built. It’s nice because every blog is different, and it’s beautiful to see the personalization. It is also a selfish act – I find inspiration for my own blog!
- Upvote: If I like the post I’m reading, I upvote it! This is mostly on Bear blogs, but it is important. Everyone loves to know that people liked their content, and upvoting matters (both in discovery terms and in the good feeling of “hey, someone liked what I wrote today”).
Needless to say, this is not to degrade the concept of RSS – it’s amazing. The fact that I can open one app and get a curated feed with only the content I want to read is fantastic (for me, there is no read later). Just take the extra step to open the website itself, upvote if you feel like it, and maybe take a quick tour.
This post is part of July Reply, a monthly challenge by Robert Birming. Check it out!