The wonders of RSS
It seems little icons are springing up alongside my blog like Christmas decorations. A week ago I added myself to Technorati (the benefits of which - other than having my really quite strange image on one more webpage - I'm still not entirely clear on), and now I have a proud Bloglines badge to go with it.
Now the benefits of Bloglines are a little clearer. Once you've registered, if you see a nice blog (say, this one), you click on my lovely new button and it's added to your list of feeds (or, if there's no button, you can use this clever feature to subscribe anyway). What does this mean? Well, effectively you're creating your own news website (there's that Daily Me again - I've already decided to set it as my homepage.). Every time you log onto Bloglines you get a list of blogs down the left hand column, complete with the number of postings added since you last checked. You click to see those new postings.
Now this is very similar to RSS Reader, another nifty bit of software I've been using for some time. You install it, select which 'feeds' you're interested in, and how often you want an update. Then, say twice a day, a little window appears in the bottom right corner of your screen with a list of the latest headlines.
And this is where I come back to Technorati. Now that I'm a 'member', I can subscribe to my blog watchlist through them. This is basically a list of any sites that link to mine (as long as they're a Technorati member). So if you want to know who's linking to your blog, or indeed any blog you like, log into Technorati, click on Settings, and in the 'Add a Watchlist' box type the address of the blog in question. Click 'Create' to generate a URL, switch to RSS Reader, click on the + sign, and paste the address into the window that appears.
And one more button has appeared since I began writing this post: My Yahoo! now incorporates syndication too.
Now the benefits of Bloglines are a little clearer. Once you've registered, if you see a nice blog (say, this one), you click on my lovely new button and it's added to your list of feeds (or, if there's no button, you can use this clever feature to subscribe anyway). What does this mean? Well, effectively you're creating your own news website (there's that Daily Me again - I've already decided to set it as my homepage.). Every time you log onto Bloglines you get a list of blogs down the left hand column, complete with the number of postings added since you last checked. You click to see those new postings.
Now this is very similar to RSS Reader, another nifty bit of software I've been using for some time. You install it, select which 'feeds' you're interested in, and how often you want an update. Then, say twice a day, a little window appears in the bottom right corner of your screen with a list of the latest headlines.
And this is where I come back to Technorati. Now that I'm a 'member', I can subscribe to my blog watchlist through them. This is basically a list of any sites that link to mine (as long as they're a Technorati member). So if you want to know who's linking to your blog, or indeed any blog you like, log into Technorati, click on Settings, and in the 'Add a Watchlist' box type the address of the blog in question. Click 'Create' to generate a URL, switch to RSS Reader, click on the + sign, and paste the address into the window that appears.
And one more button has appeared since I began writing this post: My Yahoo! now incorporates syndication too.
posted by Paul Bradshaw at 1:56 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home