The standard RSS icon is too common. Everyone has seen it. Make your feed subscription more appealing by using one of the unique icons below.

The first 43 are all free, and many come with a range of color variations. The last section is probably free, but you’ll need to email the authors to be certain. Click an image to visit the source of the icon.

Circular Feed Icons

In the past few days, I redesigned my sidebar. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? But looking back, that one change has had quite an impact on the overall look.

In blogs in particular, the sidebar is a big part of your design. But also in blogs, they tend to be quite poorly done. The reason is that very few of us design our sidebars with content in mind.

I’m guilty as well. When I first designed the sidebar for this blog, I was thinking about leaderboard ads and various widgets. Since then, I’ve dropped the ads, changed the widgets and added a sideblog.

Odds are, your sidebar content has changed in the course of your blogging as well. It is important to reassess your entire blog every now and again, but the sidebar is one area that you should pay particular attention to because of its changing nature.

In this post, I want to go through how I reassessed mine, and worked to improve it. You can then apply the same process to your own blog.

When I reviewed the new Freelance Switch design, one thing I noted was how they display their subscriber count as plain text, not using the little FeedBurner chicklet.

This trick isn’t one that you usually see around the blogosphere, so I did a little investigating. The effect can be achieved using FeedBurner’s Awareness API.

Unfortunately, I’m yet to find a guide as to how exactly…

However, there is good news for WordPress users. Francesco Mapelli has put together a very easy to use plugin that does all the heavy lifting for you. Install the plugin like any other plugin, then fill in a few options, and you’ll end up with markup like this in your HTML:

Freelance Switch is the blog that everyone wants to have. In just 6 months, Collis and his team have taken it from 0 to 15,000 subscribers. It began by giving advice to freelancers, but has quickly developed into a job board, a forum, a book, and more. It has become a one-stop shop for freelancers.

And what’s more? It has a stunning design! So naturally when it was redesigned this week, the candidate for the weekly blog review was obvious (Though it has added to that Year of the Redesign feeling!).

Carl Ocab writes a blog on how to make money online. There are many, many sites about making money online, but this one is different. Carl is 14 years old. Starting at age 13, he has worked up his way to 300 subscribers, and designed the theme himself! When Carl asked for a review, I was happy to oblige.

What Has Been Done Well?

• Style. Carl is 14, and he’s proud of it. Perhaps the site could have looked more professional? Traditional? Dollar-bill-green? Instead, Carl’s theme is modern and forward. It’s a new generation. New advice. A classic design just wouldn’t cut it for him.
• Color and logo. The color and logo are the main proponents of the style here. The highly contrasting black and white colors, mixed with the dark red look modern. The logo is fantastic, not because of the modern font, but look at the decoration behind it. It’s not just a decoration. It’s a graph! A perfect fit with the blog’s topic.

Feedburner provide a free service, whereby they monitor a number of stats about your RSS feed, as well as offer a few other tweaks (Like the email subscription option we offer here). All of these services are fantastic, yes, but arguably the coolest offering Feedburner has is the little subscriber count button. But what do you do when you don’t want your readers nosing into those stats?

NB - This method will only work for Wordpress users.

Why Is the Subscriber Count Button Useful?

1. The statistic itself is a valuable one. The subscriber count tells you how many people have decided that what you write on your blog is important enough for them to read it regularly. There are many other ways of judging a site’s success, each with their own drawbacks, but for a blogger, what could be better than knowing that someone out there considers your writings to be worth reading?