The Gawker Media blogs (Consumerist, Gizmodo, etc.) do something with their RSS feeds that is incredibly annoying: they include a "category" of sorts before the title of the post:

This does two things:

1. It obscures the actual title of the post. Many feed readers are loaded in the sidebar, which has a limited width. You should be making the best use of this space.

2. It makes it harder to scan the items to find something of interest. I can't scan the first few words of each title, since each title actually begins at a different point for each item, depending on the length of the category name. I've found that I rarely read items from the Gizmodo feed just because it's difficult to parse the titles for interesting news, but I read Engadget much more frequently for the opposite reason.

As far as I am concerned, these prologues add no value. Gawker: please either use the <category> tag in RSS for this information or provide a feed that doesn't have it at all.

I've updated the Feed Statistics plugin for Wordpress to version 1.2; this update adds a "Top Feeds" page where you can see what the most popular feeds for your website are (e.g., main feed, category feeds, different feed formats). It shows a list of all of the feed URLs that your subscibers are requesting, and how many people are requesting each feed.

(Note: if you're already running the plugin, this page will take some time to fully populate.)

This release also includes a fix proposed in the comments section by Nathan Pralle to better detect all of the different ways that feeds are accessed. Thanks Nathan!

To install this plugin:

• If you installed an earlier version, download the zip file of the latest version here, and overwrite feed-statistics.php in your blog's wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• If you're downloading it for the first time, just copy it to that directory and activate it from the Plugin administration menu.

Want an easy way to generate a podcast or RSS feed? At Eliot's request, I wrote a PHP script that generates an RSS feed based on the contents of its parent directory, so whenever you add files to that directory (or its subdirectories), the feed is updated with links to those files. It also supports enclosures, so if you add an audio or video file to the directory, that file will be available to podcast clients. If you modify a file in the directory, the feed updates the link so that subscribers will see that it has changed. It's a no-fuss way to syndicate content without having to tie it into a CMS like Wordpress or TypePad.

Here's how to use it:

1. Save this file as EasyFeed.php (or dir.php or feed.php, it doesn't really matter).
2. Copy it to a directory on your webserver.
3. Subscribe to the feed with any RSS or podcasting client.

That's all there is to it. For example, here's the feed of all of the files I've ever uploaded for use in my blog. If you subscribe to that feed with iTunes, you'll see that I've uploaded two audio files: programming.mp3 and calacanis.mp3. iTunes will automatically download them, as well as any other audio/video files I upload. No fuss, no muss.