Do you subscribe to your own RSS feeds? You should. It may sound like a strange form of vanity but it's not. It's a defense mechanism. If you don't subscribe, how do you know what your readers are getting? I subscribe to my personal site and social media feeds, as well as those of sites I work on. Several times I've caught and fixed problems with feeds before clients or readers have noticed anything.

This week I caught a problem on my own LinkedIn account. I'm not sure why, but LinkedIn suddenly started aggregating my Twitter account. This is not something that I'm interested in. I caught it after only a few tweets because it showed up in my LinkedIn feed. If I didn't subscribe it could have been months before I noticed.

What should you subscribe to?

• Your company site
• Your blog
• Your social media sites
• Hashtags and news searches for you, your company, or your industry

Any subscription you'd add?

I use Google Reader which I sync to several computers and other devices, but there are a number of good feed readers available.

I've recently been playing with a free PHP Script. I'm incorporating a little of the dynamic content of the blog into the main page (since removed in an update) using a PHP script pulling in the RSS feed. It's a very user friendly set-up. The documentation leaves a little to be desired, and the sample template had to be completely redone for my use, but the actual script is quite impressive. If you're looking for this sort of thing, it's well worth your time. The superior quality of the script far outweighs the negatives of the documentation and template. To get the results I wanted, I changed the template file to PHP and removed all of the extraneous coding. Changing the template to PHP allowed me to remove a lot of the HTML in the template, making for cleaner ocde when it was pulled into the home page. Then all that was left was to add the proper CSS selectors and it was ready to go.