There’s a common computer phrase that deals with eating your own dog food. What this means in plain language is that you use the product you produce. For example, does the owner of an airline company fly his own airline in the coach section? In the case of the Reader Appreciation Project, we eat our own dog food by using the Ajax Edit Comments plugin on the blog.

Why is it important to eat your own dog food? Because if you do, you’ll be experiencing your site or product from the perspective of a end user. Theoretically, the product should be better in the long run since the makers of the product also use the product and see the flaws.

When it comes to readers of your blog, do you see what they see? In other words, are you eating your own dog food? Within this post, I will go over how to see what your readers see.

Subscribe to Your Own Feed

Do you know what your site’s content looks like from the perspective of a feed reader? If not, it’s about time you went over to Google Reader and added your site.

I’ve had the practice of subscribing to the feeds of all the blogs I write for. If an image looks off, or if I have forgotten to close a tag, the feed reader is a great place to pick up such errors. Having a post look good in the context of a design is one thing. Having the post look good in the context of a feed is another.

I realized the issue of adding certain design elements in a feed so I wrote a WordPress plugin called Feed Styler. We use this plugin here exclusively for styling images in a feed.

Using Your Own Design

With the recent launch of the design here at RA Project, it is important to me to use and navigate the design religiously. There may have been something I missed. There may be features that are lacking.

After using your own design for a while, you start to notice the little flaws. For example, how does one find the past news on this site? Not easily unless you go to the Sitemap.

Another way of using your own design indirectly is to watch someone else navigate around it. Point someone towards your blog and watch and observe. Are there areas the user clicks and nothing happens? Does the user type the search query into the wrong box? What does the user do after he goes to a post?

Using Your Site From Other Browsers

If a significant number of your readers use Internet Explorer, perhaps it’s a good idea to use this browser to browse your site from time to time. If you are struggling with finding ways to install multiple installations of Internet Explorer, there’s a nice tool out there called Multiple IEs.

You might also try using the Opera browser to view your blog and see how those users see your site.

Visiting Your Site Not Logged in as Admin

It was recently brought to my attention that the Subscribe to Comments plugin on this site wasn’t working very well. If I had made some comments as non-admin and subscribed to my own comments, perhaps I would have found out this issue much earlier without a reader having to point it out to me.

I highly suggest making comments (or viewing your site) from time to time not logged in as admin. You see what the readers see in this case, and some problems that wouldn’t occur as admin might occur as a regular reader.

Conclusion

The readers see your blog a lot differently from what you see. Your goal should be to make every attempt to see what your readers see. A few tips I pointed out are subscribing to your own feed, using your design, and visiting your blog as a non-admin. Can you think of any more tips on how to see what the readers see?

Thank you for reading.

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