This has probably been mentioned thousands of times by bloggers all over, and I know I've mentioned it, but you really NEED to use Google Reader to view your feeds on a regular basis. Besides the fact that it's free and resides on their server (which means you don't have pull the feeds in yourself), it archives hundreds of your old messages.

I just went through it, looking to see how far back it goes for my blog. How does September 8, 2006 sound? How does 375 posts sound? Granted a lot of them are not full feeds because I wasn't using full feeds until February of this year (I think). Still, that's a whole lot of messages to have around as a backup in case your database server takes a dump and your last backup wasn't today.

Google Reader stores the post title, the content, the date, and even the time. Using the visual editor of WordPress, you can create a new post, copy the entire message from the reader (including links), set the time and date in the editor's "Post Timestamp" and publish. It only takes a few seconds to do it. The clincher is that you have to make sure you have a Google Reader account and subscribe to your own feeds. After that, you can get away with looking at it only once every month and all the feeds will be there.

While I'm on the subject of feeds, if you're not using Feedburner, along with the Feedburner Plugin for WordPress, you need to investigate if using that service might be beneficial for you. It is for me.