New for 2010

(Ignoring the fact that I'm a wee bit early here.....)

I've added an RSS feed for my bloggy bits. I've been loathe to do this for ages, for many different reasons, the primary being that it draws people away from your site, which is not really desirable when you are trying to sell products on that site, yes? To that end, I'll either have to change my blogging style to incorporate more links to my site (I know - waaaaaahhhhhhh! OH-SO-DIFFICULT-IT-IS) or I might end up posting a subject line only to the RSS feed as a teaser with a link back to the site to get the full entry. (A lot of food bloggers do this and I have mixed feelings on it. I find myself not reading them as much after they've done that but, from what I can gather, they also do it to drive more people to their actual site vs. just having a bunch of anonymous people skimming their stuff on Google reader. Pros and cons to it, I guess.)

I've tried to figure out how to embed a blog w/a feed on the main page of my site but, invariably, about 3 minutes into my research on it my eyes start to glaze over and I feel a coma start to come on from the icky-picky technicality of it all. (I'm not sure I have enough qualification on such matters to say that it's a difficult thing to do but I think the fact that I've yet to see a single Pappashop-hosted site with an rss-feed blog embedded on a page speaks for itself. Such sites probably do exist but I have to think it's pretty rare. It goes beyond your average click-and-drag html skill set, that's for sure.)

But I'm sure I'm not the only one who adores their RSS feeds so I guess I should get with the program and get one myself. I love love love love my Google reader. It's stuffed full of food bloggers, knit bloggers, political bloggers, everyday bloggers, tv industry stuffs, on and on and on. It's not unusual for me to open it up in the morning and have 100+ posts to dig through. Do I read it all? Hardly. I skim like a mofo. lol I treat it like a magazine. My own personally designed, totally 100% free,  magazine labeled ME. I read the parts that look interesting and skim through the rest. It's a good thing. :)