RSS, Really Simple Syndication, is a very simple but powerful tool used on websites. Mostly used on blogs this tool allows the readers to subscribe to the website and stay updated with the recent updates. Aside from having good content for your users to subscribe, sometimes Rss design and placement also comes in handy to increase your subscriber count.

In this post I will be sharing tons of free icons sets for rss as well as examples of best feed placement. Note: These icons does not belong to Balkhis therefore before abusing using it make sure you read the guidelines provided by the designer.

Let me put the general guidelines for the use of these icons:

Do not take the credit away from the designers.
Do not sell these icons
Stick with personal use unless commercial use is allowed by the designers

Ultimate goal of bloggers

The ultimate goal of bloggers is to have a large loyal reader base which they keep track by using RSS Feeds through feedburner and track the count of their subscribers. Many things decide whether your user would subscribe to your website or not. One of the things are the right placement for the RSS Buttons, and how well you embed it on the website.

Best Placement and Practices of RSS Designs

Best Placement of RSS Designs are mostly toward the very top. Making your reader scroll to find the RSS is one of the mistakes many bloggers make. The more creative the RSS Button looks, the more it will impress the users and will lead them to subscribe.

Below are some of the best / creative examples of RSS

You can see this icon at the top of this page. This style embeds with the design and looks natural.

This was one of the most unique rss symbols I have seen. Very nicely done, and It is animated.

This is another example of how simple an RSS Design can look yet blend in and still look good.

Very cool background for the rss. Unique !!!

Smashing magazine has always put up great resources on the web for web designers. There icon is one of the coolest.

Now that you have seen some of the unique and good looking RSS Buttons, let me present to you the bunch of free collection of icon sets. [The rest is in the full post]

I am hoping that most of you know what w3c is. Well let me give you a little overview of what w3c is before I give out some tips on how to fix some of the common mistakes. W3C was developed in 1994 for the sole purpose of having web standards and guidelines. Why W3C? “In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together” (W3C, About).

As I go along, I see alot of websites are coded horribly. Believe me or not they are. All because the designer of the site was careless. Sometimes the script coders were. Open tags are left everywhere which causes the website to be W3C xhtml invalid. Or even the css, which shouldn’t be, is invalid for some sites. Let me assist you on how to fix these issues. But I know most of you will probably think that this is another boring article and will stop reading, so let me tell you the benefits of having your site w3c valid.

Faster Loading

If you have broken html codes, your site will take longer to load because the browser have to fix for your mistakes often which they are not really good at. Also it will take longer for search engines to spider your pages therefore slowing down your indexing rate.

Search engine friendly pages

Say that your designer or even you were trying to add something on your site, and you made a mistake like the one below:

<span Helping bloggers is the motive of our site.</span>

rather than having the right thing which looks like the code below:

<span> Helping bloggers is the motive of our site.</span>

The effect of this would be that when search engine indexes it and someone researched for helping bloggers. The site with the error will show in the description <span which will turn away your users whereas the site which is valid will not have this issue.

Less load on server / Cheap hosting Price

By having all the style codes keep repeating in your html file you are going to make the size of your html files very large which will take up alot of space in your hosting account. Then the loading of these big files every time will cause more bandwidth to be used. By using CSS stylesheet you can minimize that, but remember to have it valid. (Check CSS Validation Here).

Larger Audience / Browser Compatibility

By having your sites …. [Trust me this is a long one so go in and read all the tips these are just the benefits above]

Do you ever wonder that you have one sidebar, but you want to display widgets in other places, and they don’t come in with manual codes that you can enter in the page and avoid using the widgets. Well there are some widgets that doesn’t have the manual tags. The solution to those is to add more than one dynamic sidebar in wordpress and display them where you want. I like this because I can manage everything from my wordpress admin panel and have everything where I want on the template. Kill two birds with one stone.

I have made a detailed video, which I will recommend you to watch because that will make the steps much more understandable, but I think you need to visit here to actually get the codes because it might not be as clear in the video.

First of all, Open your functions.php which is located in the themes folder.

Follow the rest of the tutorial in the full post.

Your website needs an identity, and you can give it an identity in seconds. Now you are probably thinking what do I mean by identity. Well, when you go to an airport the first thing the guy checks is your passport and before reading everything else, he sees your picture to match you, so on the passport your picture is your identity, and on your website your Favicon is your identity. What is a favicon? Favicon is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage which is shown next to the url in the url bar in the browser. It is also known as website icon, page icon, and/or url icon.

It is very easy to make and if you get a custom designer you should ask your designer upon the completion of the project for a small favor and that is to make a favicon for you. (Alright designers don’t kill me for making your customers a pain) but fellas you can ask for it and it doesn’t take long for a designer to make a 16 x 16 .ico file for you. But many of you should know how to do this on your own so you are not dependant on anyone else.

First of all you need to open a designing software (Adobe Photoshop if you have it), or get a 16 x 16 png for your website your logo or some icon that represents you, and then you can convert it using one of the online converters.

Auto Favicon from Images
Convert Icon

If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop or you don’t want to use online converter then your best option is ….. [Read in the full post]

Comments on your blog is a way to show the freshness and constant activity on your blog. While you might think that the wordpress default comment box does the job, but it can’t hurt to pimp your comment area and give your user different options and reasons to post comment on your blog post.

After going through multiple comment plugins, i have collected a list of some comment plugins that you can use to pimp your comment area in wordpress.

Widgets that encourage participation on your blog

- Top Commentators

4null4 Top Commentator
Scott Riley’s Top/Recent Commentator Plugin
PFA’s Top Commentator Plugin

Removing nofollows from trackbacks and comments also increases participation

DoFollow – removes nofollow tags from the comments – Download
Do Follow Trackbacks – removes nofollow tags from the trackbacks. – Download

Now while you are allowing follow links it have one bad side to it. It increases spam, but on the good side the spam can be reduced and monitored.

Akismet Spam Stopper – created by the developers of Wordpress, this usually comes installed in the default copy of wordpress and requires the API key which can be obtained for free from Wordpress.

More of this in the post