I subscribed to around 60 new blogs earlier today after discovering an OPML file (feed or blog's feeds) that looked interesting to me. The blogs happen to have a local tech focus, so they're not necessarily high traffic or great blogs, but I figure they may be of interest to me since they're local.

This has turned into an interesting study. I've never visited most of the sites in the OPML feed, so my first impressions of the 60 sites (a combination of programmers, tech consultants, and tech company blogs) is through their writing - stripped away from their blog's formatting.

Here are a few things I've notices coming out of this group:

1. Closed comments on older posts. Some of the blogs are closing comments on older posts. This is a comment spam prevention strategy, but one that I personally dislike since it cuts off what could be meaningful conversations started by people who discovered a post some time in the future. I felt the pain tonight when I found a post interesting while reading it in Google Reader, but found out comments were closed when I clicked through to the original post. Personally, I think comments can be valuable whether they come in during the first few weeks or later on, so prefer keeping things open to anyone who has something interesting to say in the future.

2. Blogs with problematic formatting or archiving. Many of the blogs I added were from programmers who looked at current available blog platforms (Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type, etc.) and decided they would just build their own. While that sounds like a good idea, when they have problems with their content formatting correctly in their RSS feed or haven't gotten around to creating an RSS feed for their blog (something they'd have by default in any established blogging platform) one has to wonder if creating a blogging platform is worth duplicating when others have already put a lot of time into working on the problem.

3. Font choices in RSS feed. Some developers DO figure things out and take things further than most blogging platforms by setting font choices within RSS feeds. While this may seem like a good idea, since it gives publishers more control over how their content is displayed, as a reader, I hate it. I don't want to have to adjust my eyes to new fonts from one blog post to the next while I peruse my RSS feeds. One of the great things about using an RSS reader is the consistency in type styles, making it easy for me to focus on the content rather than the presentation. Sites abusing that will likely get dropped since they give me a headache.

4. Truncated Feeds. With 60 new feeds to read, I have enough new content to read without clicking out to read beyond the first three sentences of a blog post. While forcing people to click over to your site is a great way to increase visitors, it only works if people are willing to subscribe to your feed and put up with the inconvenience you've created. I believe I only subscribe to ONE feed that doesn't provide a FULL RSS feed out of, currently, 246 feeds, so a feed has to be particularly outstanding to justify putting up with the inconvenience. The new sites I discovered today with truncated RSS feeds did not make the cut. Sadly, if those sites were to change their feeds to full feeds tomorrow, I probably wouldn't notice for a long time since there is no good way to track such things today. Perhaps sites with truncated feeds should offer a sign-up where they say, "Yeah, we're making you work too hard to read our stuff, but if you fill out this form, we'll let you know when we start treating you the way we like to be treated."

5. Consistent Posting. While it's certainly not necessary to post multiple times a day, every day, or even weekly, if a blog doesn't have some level of consistency, or INCREDIBLY GREAT content, it has a hard time gaining traction. Blogs are formed with many different goals in mind, but in this case, the goal seems to largely be generating business in the form of tech consulting / programming where a consistent and up to date blog would create a better impression on prospects than an inconsistently published blog.

What do you think a software developer's blog should look like?