Feed me, Blogger

I think Blogger could do a better job with feeds. There is no setting to turn on a familiar orange feed icon, and the site feed settings are confusing for most new bloggers. There is a page element widget for adding external feeds, but it also does not display a helpful icon.

Now I know most modern browsers automatically detect feeds, and many people use sophisticated feed readers, but this is all about turning visitors into regular readers. They expect to see a feed link or icon on the blog.

Ways Blogger could make it easier:

• A radio or checkbox on the feed widget to select the feed of the blog
• feed icons on the site feed page to choose from.
  
• Giving the blog writer choices on displaying their blog feeds by label in site feeds
  
• A real feed management area

Google did aquire Feedburner recently, so I expect a lot of things to change pretty soon. I'm hopeful anyway. Until then, it gives me a lot to cover in the Syndication chapter of the book.