Tech Stuff
Sep 20th, 2007 by admin
The content here is published using the WordPress Blog. This makes it easy for our officers to make updates using the WordPress interface and without coding in html, or uploading files with ftp.
Since this site uses WordPress (WP), and since WP supports RSS feeds, you can subscribe to the home page and keep up with us without visiting the web site. In fact you might want to use RSS to gather articles from other web pages that have content of interest to you. RSS feeds bring the news you want to you instead of you having to go out and visit a bunch of web sites. Let your computer automate the task of gathering up the things that interest you, and present them to you all in one place (an Aggregator). That’s what RSS feeds do. What follows is a short primer on RSS, Aggregators, and RSS to Email forwarding.
Many of us have portal sites such as the personalized Google, or my.yahoo.com set as our home pages. Each of these has the ability to display RSS feeds on your home page. If you have a gmail account, you can display an RSS feed as a clip at the top of your email. If you have a Google personalized home page, you can sign up for reader.google.com and display a link to your news feeds on your home page. Every time you visit you will see if you have any unread articles.
Here is a very cool video of the hows and whys of RSS feeds. (You’ll love the non tech way this is presented.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU
Some email programs such as Thunderbird have RSS feed subscription functionality built in. Since you check your email regularly anyway, this adds the equivalent of another inbox and shows any unread articles.
On any WordPress blog you can subscribe to new posts and to comments about posts. Look for the link at the very bottom of the page. For either type of link, right click on it, select copy, and then paste it into the proper location of the program you are using to aggregate the links. The link will look like this;
http://atlantawoodturnersguild.org/wp/?feed=rss2
If you try and open that link in your browser you will see something that looks like HTML code (actually XML) instead of a pretty web page. This is the code that tells your aggregator how to find what you are looking for.
NOTE: After pasting from WP, you may see the first word as “feed:http://” Remove the first “feed” but not the second word “feed”.
I encourage you to explore RSS feeds. You may find that many websites you often visit have feeds. A reader is how you can get them all to appear on one page for viewing and you dont have to navigate to a bunch of websites.
To find feeds that others subscribe to ( a top 100 list) go to http://share.opml.org/. From here you can import an OPML file that will automatically subscribe you to feeds that match your interests.
It gets better. . . .
Suppose you’d rather have the RSS feeds in your INBOX where you can apply rules to filter and sort them into folders? Here are 2 free websites that offer this service. You tell them the RSS feeds you want and they grab them and email them to you!
Cheers!
Jon
