Tag: RSS

Using RSS

Sick of facebook deciding what you get to read from your favourite websites? Wish you could be informed of every single post so you don’t miss anything? Then step back in time and find out a little about RSS, a simple and reliable way to keep on top of posts.

Of course, it depends on websites supporting RSS, but a surprising number do (given that it’s trivial to set up), including The Moshville Times. And this one.

I use Feedly as my RSS reader. It’s accessible via the web or an app. The free account limits you to 100 feeds, which should be plenty to get you going.

Alternatively, there’s the Vivaldi web browser which has an RSS module built into its email client as of recently, though it’s still a little clunky. Those of you using Outlook (the full app) can also make use of its inbuilt RSS reader.

There are others, too. A quick Google turned up this article which lists another four.

Once you have your reader, it’s usually as simple as entering the URL of your chosen website into it. The reader will locate the RSS feed and add it as a subscription. Worst case you may need to locate the site’s feed yourself, but it should be a simple matter of looking down the sidebar for “RSS” or the logo seen above. Copy the link and use that.

Then just set notifications, if needs be, or check your reader when you want to catch up. You won’t miss a post from your chosen websites again! No stupid algorithm, no 2-day delay until the site decides that it’s your turn to read something.

Posting multiple blogs to facebook

This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...
More feeds, please, vicar!

Yes, OK. I gave up and started using facebook because so many of you don’t bother to reply to emails or use Twitter. It’s all your fault. You all suck. Fine.

One (of several) annoying things I’ve found with facebook is that it will only let you publish feed from one blog on your wall. I have two that I want to put up there. I started off with one of them, which it popped up as “notes” well enough, putting the complete blog post up. But that wasn’t enough so I started digging.

I found a few feed “aggregators” which effectively take multiple RSS feeds and create one merged feed from that. Yes, I know that’s not the correct term for them, bit it does make sense. Unfortunately, none of them published the entire article. Instead they’d publish the first few hundred words followed by a “click here to see the rest” link to the original page.

In honesty, this did the job although I know personally that I often won’t bother. And I wanted people to read everything.

For the record, the aggregator I settled on was Feedoor which did the best job with the most ease. It’s also set at my favourite price point, i.e. it’s free. [NOTE: Mamod from Feedoor saw this blog post, replied and sorted out my feed from them so that the next step wasn’t needed! Please see the comments]

As luck would have it, I just found another website. What this one does is takes partial feeds from anywhere, locates the original posts and creates a complete feed from it. This web page is Five Filters.

Popping my feed from Feedoor into Five Filters generates a complete RSS feed containing posts from both this blog and my travel blog. I put the full URL given my by Five Filters into my “notes” page on facebook and *ta-da*, the whole shebang.

Yes, only a few lines show on my wall, but it now includes the images from the blog posts and it means people can stay within facebook if they don’t want to hop out to another page. Clicking on the article takes you to the entire blog post as a note within facebook.

A bit of a long way around, but finally the job is done.

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