Newsfeed Easter Eggs

The Internet Duct Tape site offers blogging, programming, technology, and lifehacks as does Significant Figures, but IDT is way ahead of the game when it comes to attracting RSS subscribers. One of the neat little ideas the site describes is how to create a secret Easter eggs page for your blog’s loyal RSS readers. You only get to find the Easter eggs if you subscribe to the feed. IDT walks you through the steps to creating the page and shows you how to add the special secret link to your RSS feed using a Feedburner personal feedflare.

It’s all very easy to do and so I’ve created just such a page for Significant Figures subscribers and for the Sciencebase site, subscribe to either or both site’s feeds and you get access to a whole bunch of great freebies, including free IT magazines, Joost and Pownce invites, free text link ads on a high-ranking page, as well as access to the hidden pages associated with the Sciencebase site including the site’s Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon pages. Plus, there will be periodically updated links to special articles and news accessible only via this password-protected page. So click this link to subscribe to the RSS feed.

And, don’t worry, the Easter Egg page is coming soon for Significant Figures. This could be just the key to doubling your RSS subscribers in our Feedburner Competition and one more thing to celebrate on Click an Orange Day.

Warning: password protection does not work if you are running the wp-cache plugin under Wordpress to save your server from overload. Choice is either to disable wp-cache and risk overrunning your CPU allowance or else simply disable the password. As long as the page is not linked from your site, the only way visitors will find it is via the RSS feed. Admittedly, feeds get scraped and so the page will inevitably be spidered and accessible to all, but that does not detract from the fact that it would be so much easier for visitors to simply subscribe to get the freebies rather than surfing the net to find the page without subscribing.