How many of you don’t subscribe to your own blog feed? Probably not very many. But in reality you should definitely subscribe to your blog feed since it can highlight any blog issues you have so that you can catch them much faster than you might otherwise.

How does it look?
How do your entries look in Bloglines, Google Reader, etc? When you subscribe to your own blog you can see how it looks, and you can notice things such as the fact you are only offering partial feeds when you thought you offered full. You can also check to see if there are weird formatting issues going on or anything else that makes your content look less-than-perfect when viewed in an RSS Reader.

Tech issues
Did you Wordpress bork your RSS feeds? What if you have been blogging daily for the last three weeks, but none of your subscribers knew it because their feed for your blog wasn’t updating? Programs aren’t fail safe and it is much better to notice on your own that your feed is not updating than to rely on your subscribers who might have thought you just must have gone on an extended vacation.

Hackers
Depending on your RSS settings, your RSS feed will update when something is changed on your blog. This means if your site falls victim to an injection attack where 10k worth of spammy hidden links are added to each entry, you should see each of those blog posts updated in your feed reader (however, it won’t show up if they are added in your blog footer, unfortunately). If you wake up in the morning and see that all your recent blog entries have been mysteriously updated overnight, that is a definite flag that something nefarious probably went on during the night. And if you spot a brand new blog entry by a hacker coming through, you will be on top of it too, rather than not noticing until the next time you logged into your blog.

Check snippets
If you are not including full blog entries, you can start optimizing snippets by seeing how they are appearing in your reader, and so you can continue to tweak as necessary. You can also check and see how excerpts are displaying.

RSS ads
If you are using RSS advertising, you can check your entries to make sure the ads are not only relevant, but that any advertisements you do not want displaying your ads are not showing up. And it gives you the opportunity to blog any ads from showing before most of your subscribers see them.

Quickly spot problems before everyone sees them
If you make a habit to refresh your RSS reader right after you post to your blog, you can also spot problems and fix them immediately, before they show up on everyone else’s reader. While you might not catch them all before they update, you could fix that embarrassing typo you made in the RSS excerpt before most of your subscribers download the feed.

Me, Myself & I
Do you have a lot of blogs? It makes sense to set them all up in the same folder, whether you call it “mine”, “me” or “vanity” in your RSS feed reader, then you can quickly scan them regularly. (Yes, mine is called Me, Myself & I… I suppose I was feeling creative that day!) But just don’t forget to regularly check the feed… subscribing to your own feed doesn’t do any good if you are not checking it

There are a ton of reasons to subscribe to your own feeds, especially when you are following other blogs in a blog RSS reader as well. So go and add every feed - including the comment feeds - to your RSS reader so you can be the first to spot potential problems, so they can be fixed before others spot them too!