Making it easy for visitors to get back to your blog after they’ve found it is an important task that must be taken into account. Who wants visitors to stop by just once? I’ve found two nifty tools that help make my blog available to a variety of bookmark apps and feed readers while preserving space: Feedburner and AddThis.

Feedburner

Feedburner isn’t new. I’ve been using it for quite a while. But what is new is that Google has acquired it, and it now is completely free. There are a bunch of features so it’s best to just go and check it out for yourself. The feature I want to talk about here is SmartFeed. You don’t have to worry about supporting both formats (RSS and Atom) because it will detect which the reader supports and convert the feed on the fly (it only says it converts Atom to RSS, I’m not sure if it goes the other way). No need to link to an RSS feed and an Atom feed. A minor space saver plus bonus features!

AddThis

This seems relatively new as I’ve only caught a few blogs using it. I’m sure you’ve seen a monstrously long list of bookmark links like this:

Why waste all that space when you can minimize it to a single button? I’m using AddThis so just go ahead and click the bookmark link in my sidebar, and you can see that it gives you all those choices plus a lot more. They’ve even got a plugin for WordPress to make using it easier. You don’t even have to sign up to use it. So now you have no excuse. Go out and get it! You can also get a feed link, but I don’t see a need to use it with Feedburner.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 8:53 pm and is filed under web development and tagged with addthis, blog, feed, feedburner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.