Changes In ZRecs' RSS Feed

We have changed our RSS feed format to offer a sizeable chunk of each post in our RSS feed and email digests, rather than the whole enchilada, and we want to tell you why.

Blogs live or die by their traffic, in more ways than one. We need you to stop by when something really interests you, both so that your interest in Z Recommends registers with existing and potential advertisers (whether or not you visit their sites) but also so that we can tell when a post strikes a chord with our subscribers, who we consider our core readership. Our subscribers vote with their visits, showing us which of our reviews, commentaries, and reports are the most compelling, and offer an alternative metric to the spikes of traffic driven by external links and viral posts.

But we can only trust what we see if we know it arose from a natural behavior - from a desire to read the rest. We have set our post feed length at a full 500 characters (the standard is 200, or even headlines only) because we don’t want to use teasers or headlines as a bait-and-switch tactic, and we don't want to alter our writing style to fit a "read more!" formula. We may tweak with this a bit over time, but the goal will remain the same: To offer our subscribers plenty of content in their feed so they can see where every post is headed and whether it's relevant enough to them to keep reading. In shorter, informational posts, subscribers will still often see the whole post without clicking through.

We topped 1,000 subscribers for the first time last night, and wanted to say thanks to all of our longtime and new readers for inviting us into your RSS reader or email inbox. We feel privileged to have such a significant base of regular support for what we do at Z Recommends, and will continue to work hard to bring you content that is relevant and meaningful to you and your family. Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to subscribe to Z Recommends via RSS or email, click here. If you’d like to learn how to get set up with a great RSS reader (Google Reader), read our quick tutorial.

We welcome your thoughts and input about this or any of our policies or practices at Z Recommends. We'll be rolling out a reader survey within a month that will invite all of our readers to share their opinions on a broad range of topics surrounding our blog, with the goals of better understanding our readership and of making concrete changes and improvements based on reader input.