Until several weeks ago I had not used an RSS reader to access the sites that I like to visit. I'm not sure why other than it seems like the authors of those sites have only in the last year or two added RSS feeds or started their own blogs. As a result, until recently I had not even taken the time to view my own site in an RSS aggregator. I just assumed that the content had to look OK because I used the standard RSS template that ExpressionEngine provides.

Recently I viewed the feed from this site and each post looked like one large block of text as opposed to showing the proper line breaks between paragraphs, code examples, etc. Upon investigation I viewed the feed using Bloglines and Google Reader. Both aggregators confirmed that the feed was coming across in this manner.

ExpressionEngine provides very good support and I was able to quickly find a solution in their Knowledge Base. I changed my template, logged back into Bloglines and Google Reader, and . . . everything looked the same.

To make a long and frustrating story short, I found out the following about RSS and aggregators in general:

• As I made changes to my RSS template I thought those changes would be reflected in the aggregators immediately. However, RSS readers update only periodically and when they do they cache their results. Changes made to an RSS template may not show up in an aggregator for several hours. Furthermore, they may never show up depending on what aggregator you are using.
• Some aggregators, as the ExpressionEngine Knowledge Base article alluded to, do not show HTML as expected. Bloglines appears to be one of those aggregators. For that reason and although I don't really care for the interface, I've moved to Google Reader as my aggregator of choice.

In summary, I find it hard to believe that given the popularity of Bloglines it does not show whitespace as expected. And not understanding how aggregators cache their results resulted in several hours over several days of research and frustration on my part.

Why not use a software based feed reader, like FeedDemon from Newsgator? (No I am not paid to say this.) It hits your feed directly, for the latest updates, instead of relying on some web service that has a million other things to do, so it only updates every few hours.

—JP

I’ve noticed this about your feeds in the past, but most of the time I use the feed to screen which posts I was to read, and usually I go to the blog itself.

I used NewsGator when it first came out, but it was standalone at that time. I switched to Onfolio sometime later, but it was only a slight improvement. When Google’s reader became available, I switched again. I like the web-based interface, and I like being able to read it from any computer.

I use feeds to screen posts as well.  I read the first paragraph or so in a feed and if I’m interested I view the post at the site.  I never thought about it before, but I suppose it’s because I know Google Reader won’t show the page the way the author posted it on the site.

The only time I use a software based feed readers is when I use a mobile device where I only want to download text, due to speed, and want the information available to read on the go.

I use the Google Reader gadget for iGoogle.  Since I use the reader for screening, the most important things to me are having it on my iGoogle page and available across multiple computers (primarily my work computer and home computer).

I actually use Google’s Reader as well as FeedDemon, so technically I count as two subscribers to every blog I read :)

Does your blog software allow you to ping other services like Technorati, Google, Feedburner, etc? Wordpress does, so I just set it to ping sites like blogsearch.google.com, ping.feeds.yahoo.com, and so on. That way your content is updated in a few minutes, instead of whenever they feel like coming back.

—JP