ReadAir - That is like the coolest new Adobe AIR application for bloggers these days. With it’s Mac OSX interface, it lets you read your Google Reader subscriptions right from your own desktop! You guessed it right. Now you can have ReadAir on your Desktop and it’ll fully synchronize with your Google Reader account.

ReadAir fully supports the Google Reader’s tag functionality and many more features like searching for feeds. You can also Subscribe/Unsubscribe from the feeds logging into AdobeAir.

It’s still at it’s infant stage though. You’re very likely to run into a couple of bugs with the current release of version 0.11.

In the past, and every other day, I’d have this thing or the other and ultimately forget or will not be able to find the time I need to check the feeds of the blogs that I follow. Although I don’t follow many feeds by e-mail, with my Feed Reader(Google Reader), and my Following list(explained later) I pretty much follow 200+ blog feeds everyday. And by follow, I mean reading every single RELEVANT and IMPORTANT post that I come across. So this post is about “How I manage to follow 200+ blog feeds successfully, everyday!”

Letting my feed reader do most of the tracking for me.

Well, out of the 200+ I follow, 120+ are in my Feed Reader. I use Google Reader and I really hate to see a gazillion posts piled up at the end of everyday from blogs that have high posting frequencies.

This is the final part of the “Your complete guide to RSS” series. Today we’ll look at some common and un-common mistakes that bloggers make and discuss ways in eliminating it.

Do you hide your subscription options?

Some bloggers tend to give that AdSense skyscraper all the room in the sidebar and tend to literally hide their subscription options. Although I accept the fact that anyone really interested in subscribing to your feed will take the trouble in finding that ‘hidden’ button, I think having that option at the readers face will give you that edge in influencing them to subscribe.

Ever wondered how you can do something more about your RSS Feed than just displaying a chickelet in the sidebar? Well, wonder no-more for today’s discussion will be solely based on that.

• Shoe Show ‘em your chickelet!
  Yes I know! This is a bit obvious. But the important thing to remember is that it is the stepping stone for your feed. Most people who read blogs are used to look for that orange button rather than browsing to the footer and clicking on ‘XML Entries’.So keep you button visible and place it high in the sidebar so that in whatever corner your reader may be in your blog, he/she can see it as soon as the page loads, without scrolling.
• If possible, show them your Feed count.

Since this post is going to be a bit long, I am going to break it into 2 parts; Building your Feed and Promoting your Feed! So, let’s get down and dirty folks…

Building your RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Ok, technically, you won’t have to build your Feed, as almost all the blogging platforms build a RSS Feed for you by default; Yes, Wordpress, Movable Pad, Blogger and almost everything else. Usually, with Wordpress, you’ll be able to access it with ‘http://YourBlogDomain.com/feed/’; for RSS ‘../feed/rss’ and for atom ‘../feed/atom’. Yes! You get both with Wordpress.

Now, let’s take your feed one step further. Let’s BURN it!

Let’s get straight to the point shall we? When people subscribe to your RSS Feed, they simply get all the things that they need from your blog right to their RSS reader. And they will sometimes never visit your site again. So if subscription costs you a hell a lot of page hits, why do you bother giving out a Feed on your blog?

The answer is simple. Would you have a person checking out your blog content a day in his life and never again or would you have that person checking your blog content everyday?