18 July 2012

Feeds and Reads

I was asked by a friend to add an RSS feed to my blog. I was kind of surprised, because I thought that feature was already built into the Blogger template. Poking around in the settings showed me that I was mistaken.

Although I'm a heavy internet user, I've never used RSS feeds, and to be honest I've never quite grasped how they work, which is partly why I stayed away from getting into it. I went and looked around at a bunch of other blogs, Blogger and otherwise, but none of them had RSS set up either.

The Blogger help section is rather obtuse and pretty unhelpful about this feature. I was able to figure out what I was supposed to do, but an explanation of how to do it was sorely lacking. My friend pointed me to the correct place in Blogger's settings, and the correct widget to add to the layout, and I managed to suss out what code to add to the widget.

So now you'll see an RSS button over there in the right column (scroll down a bit), and those of you who use RSS can take advantage of it. Please let me know if it doesn't seem to be working properly.

(Side note: I wonder if this will have any effect on my visitor stats?)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I know there are apps etc. for RSS feeds, but me, I have pages on My Yahoo and iGoogle (which is going away next year in place of something similar on Google-product tablets or something). It's set up so it's like your own private newspaper/dashboard. It displays three previous most recent posts, and I have newspapers' sections from NYTimes, Washington Post, and Boston Globe and Herald; the Awl/Hairpin; LifeHacker, Apartment Therapy; food blogs; my friends' blogs:) and other sites. I can also read my Twitter, Facebook etc. accounts from here. It takes me minutes to scan these headlines. You're a huge internet guy, so how do you navigate it all -- do you currently use bookmarks? email subscriptions?

Anonymous said...

Aw-C'mon. Anyone asking for an RSS Feed button doesn't really understand really SIMPLE syndication (R.S.S.). Both Apple Mail & Safari allows you to create an RSS feed from the main page and I've been using that for the past 2 years.

As for Windows users, well, I'm not sure. Maybe they do need a button. I mean Microsoft has always been 3 years behind on Internet Technology.

Some Assembly Required said...

Anon: I would politely suggest that you're being somewhat unfair. People use the internet in different ways, and as you can see by the previous comment, there are those that find readers useful. And I stated in my post that I don't know how to use RSS. As someone generating original content, I can't disregard the possibility that there are others who might also appreciate a feed button.