I seem to be fluctuating between enthusiasm and feelings of "numb brain-ness" with this new technology. I hope enthusiasm wins the day, though. It seems to be taking me much longer than most people to get a handle on how to do these things. Frustration is a constant companion.
I looked at the newsfeed search sites, and found none that I really liked to use. Feedster search seems to take you to individual RSS posts, but when you go to the site there is no opportunity to find the RSS link to similar material. Similar things happened to me when I tried Syndic8 (boy is it slow!!!) and http://www.blogger.com/www.completerss.com (as mentioned in one of the tutorials). Only dawned on me that the search engine finds the feed but not the link to find feeds of a similar topic. Topix was the only search site that instantly appealed (mainly because RSS feeds are clearly labelled at the bottom of the page, but apart from general New Zealand news, nothing really appealed.)
To find RSS feeds, I mostly went to my favourite web pages, and looked for an orange box indicating a RSS link. Amazed at how many RSS feeds are available out there, and that they can be called different things, e.g. XML , ATOM
Tried searching for "RSS feeds" using Google. Had a look at Solarwarp http://www.solarwarp.net/ which lists topics in a directory format. I dipped into some of these and once again found the actual feed item, rather than a link to the subject. Reading the feed itself does not provide you with a link to other similar feeds. Could someone offer a tip please? How on earth do you find an RSS feed for a subject?
Tried once again using Google and typed as a search "Rss feeds" library. This seemed more promising. Had a look at the New York Public Library, which is using RSS feeds ( http://www.nypl.org/rss/ ) for keeping customers up-to-date with library events and news. I tried searching for some librarian humour as a feed, but got into some very dodgy sites!!
Set up a Bloglines account to record some feeds, but not sure how to attach them to my actual blog. Perhaps as a link to the blog? This is the web page address which appears when I log in: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs. However, when I'm not logged in, this does not take you to my page, so I have added a screen shot of my page (and scanned it to a jpg) to show the feeds at the top of this rant.
I tried attaching an RSS feed to my blog (Consumer product recalls), adding a Feed element, but this did not seem to work as successfully as Bloglines. See the Consumer product recall alerts. This was done several days ago, and have just made the same link to Bloglines, and already there are two more product recalls which haven't appeared on the link on my blog.
1 comment:
That's strange, that the RSS feed doesn't update on your blog at the same rate as your bloglines.
I found the RSS search tools frustrating as well, I preferred to search for feeds using the search engine within my RSS reader.
To post a url to your bloglines you first have to set up your bloglines account as public and it will give you the correct url. Took a while to figure it out.
Well done on your blog, you're going great :)
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