Who is writing these captivating blogs on ActiveRain that I am reading in my Google Reader each day?
I don't know.
To find out I have to click through. Clicking through on my Google RSS Reader is 'another click' and annoying. (To me, anyway) I just like to read them through my Reader. It's quick, it's easy, I can keep hitting 'J, J, J' and the posts fly by while I skim through. Many times I usually know who is writing the posts. The Lovely Wife has her unique style, I can usually pick out Krystal Kraft from her pictures, and Toby & Lenn drop descriptive links to their websites which points out the author pretty well. It's a good strategy too.
Why don't I know who the writer is? There is no 'author' setting in ActiveRain telling my RSS Reader the info.
I was going to post this weeks ago but I didn't. Why am I posting now? I noticed that my Google Reader has updated the author (I'm assuming AR updated something in their settings) which gives each blog the author of 'from Active Rain Blogs' and links to a Google search of ActiveRain blogs. Which is strange. I didn't know that field could be linked. I was going to take a screen capture of it and then it disappeared. Maybe AR is working on things, I'm not sure. Instead of 'from ActiveRain Blogs' it would be fabulous if the author could be the actual author of the blog. :)
Here is an example of the author setting under the blog title.
See how it says 'by William Slawski'? William is the only writer of the blog SEO by the Sea so hopefully many people would know he is writing the blogs anyway. (If you love to read about search engine patents, this is the blog to subscribe to, btw!) Another example would be The Bloodhound Blog who just recently introduced Russell Shaw as a guest poster and the 'author' field is extremely convenient for that reason. I know right away if Greg is writing, or if it is Russell.
Here is a blog by Matt but it has no author under the title. Since hundreds of blogs are written a day that are categorized as 'ActiveRain Blogs' it is a big folder to skim through. Having the author listed would be nice.
I remember reading Toby's post a few weeks ago about 'Spamming Your Own Site' and thinking while his point was valid, I actually liked the signatures because they told me who was writing the posts. When you are actually reading the posts on the AR site (and reading the comments!) the signatures and extra links are not needed as the link to your profile does the job just fine.
ActiveRain - For the RSS Readers around here, think about adding the author setting to your 'wish' list which must be miles long. :-)
For RSS subscriptions, each blog has it's own personal RSS feed. The categories and all the blogs have their own RSS feed as well. A few months ago when blogs were just getting started I subscribed to the 'Most Interesting' RSS blog feed from the AR Blog post about it. For awhile I would read the blogs in my RSS reader and then go to ActiveRain at some point and realize I was missing out on blogs. I didn't have the full RSS feed of *all* blogs. I changed my RSS feed to setup all blogs written... and still realized I missed these 'Member Posts' that people would talk about. That was when I realized I was missing out on some more valuable information and finally decided to sign up. :)
I enjoy reading my blogs in my Google Reader. It would be handy if the author tag was added. I still love to visit AR and do a quick skim through the Blog archive to view the comments and see the featured posts of the day though.
Thanks AR for being a great stop in my daily activities :)
- Kristina
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