I used to visit a handful of sites that had frequent updates to get my daily fix of new and interesting material. I now favour sites which publish at a slower frequency but which still produce high quality posts.

This is because I now skim the headlines in my RSS reader and only visit the site if the posts looks interesting. By cramming loads of headlines into a single page, I can read a greater variety of blogs and so now prefer that no single blog monopolises my reading pane.

Instead of reading 10 posts from 1 site, I now read 10 posts from 10 different sites. To do this, I wrote and integrated a RSS reader into my website and set it to show my feeds in reverse chronological order in the main pane and a few secondary feeds in the right pane. Here's a screenshot:

Integrated RSS reader (click to enlarge)

I started publishing an RSS feed for my site a while back and was pleasantly surprised to find that my obscure and infrequently updated site had some subscribers!

By providing an RSS feed, a site can attract subscribers regardless of how infrequently it is updated. In fact, the particular style I use to read feeds favours infrequent sites as too frequently updated sites 'pushes' other posts off the front page.

Feeds enable the long-tail of blogging.