The RSS posting is a built-in feature with the current version of VBulletin (3.6.2), so it doesn't even require a plugin. VB's admin panel includes an RSS feed manager that makes it easy to syndicate any valid RSS feed in the forums. It only took a few minutes to configure it.
I set it up so the forum creates a thread with a link to each new blog entry rather than re-posting the entire blog text. If I used full text feeds here, search engines might penalize the duplicate content, and having blog entries in two different places makes it harder to fix typos or make minor edits.
Secondly, I manually edited the blog's template to inject a "Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum" link at the bottom of every blog entry, including all previous entries. That link will show up in the blog's RSS feed as well. This should encourage new people to come to the forums every time I make a new blog post. These discussion links only go to the Steve Pavlina forum rather than to the individual post for two reasons: 1) I'm not sure how to get the blog to figure out what the forum post link will actually be until it shows up -- it seems like that would be a real challenge to code; and 2) it takes up to 10 minutes for the forum to auto-post a corresponding entry here once a new blog post is made because the forum only checks the feed 6 times per hour, so a direct link from the blog to the forum post would cause a 404 error for the first few minutes.
It was a tough decision having to disable blog comments back in October 2005, but the comment volume got to be way too much work for me to manage. I think the blog-forum interconnection that we have now solves this problem beautifully.
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