Call me slow, but I didn’t know until I spotted the ribbon-sellers in Collins St this morning that it’s World AIDS Day today.

There are various causes out there with varying degrees of deservedness (is there a better word to use there?). Some of those that put highway collectors out on weekends in particular I’ve never heard of, and won’t give money to. They’re probably doing good work, but how do I know? My charity dollars go to proven “brands”.

And there are various adoptions of ribbons of various colours. There are so many now that I can’t remember what they’re all for. Yellow… white… blue… what are they again?

But the red ribbon of World AIDS Day is the memorable one, and definitely worthy. I’ve got a red ribbon. Have you?

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A couple of years ago I wrote a post encouraging people with blogs to make sure their RSS feeds were turned on. I thought I might just repeat it now. RSS helps people like me who have little time to go to one place to catch up on all the blogs we like to read (and might forget to check otherwise).

It’s also worth making sure that your RSS feed is providing full posts, rather than just excerpts. It helps readers see all of your post without having to click through to your site, not just the first sentence or two. I know some people like to get comments: for me, I’m more likely to comment if I can read the entire post quickly. If I’m only seeing excerpts, unless the first sentence grabs me I won’t bother.

(Some people — myself included — use Google Ads etc to try and get some dosh from visitors to the web site. It’s true that providing full feeds means some people won’t bother visiting the site, but but for me the ads aren’t a priority… anyway some claim that you do get more visitors overall.)

So unless there’s a good reason not to, do turn on your feeds. For those many people using Blogger, the instructions are here.

And if you want to try reading others’ blogs via feeds, try Google Reader or Bloglines. You can also get software to deliver those feeds onto your computer if you don’t like reading via web pages, or use the features in Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 or Safari to easily see which blogs have been updated.

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