This post will be a little HOW TO post. I know many of you (you being the readers) have many blogs to visit and use bookmarks or such to scroll through the blogs to check for new content and posts. Some of you may not know about RSS/Atom feeds.
RSS/Atom feeds are basically standardized XML documents published by newsites and sites that update their content often. RSS/Atom feeds can be found on almost all major sites (Google News, CNN, MSNBC, the list goes on and on). Any site worth their salt has RSS/Atom feeds.
Including all blogs (unless the blog owner has done some modding to the blog code and disabled/altered the feed).
What does this mean? This means that one can view recently published posts and such from multiple blogs...and all in one place. There are multiple RSS feed readers that display desktop updates involving your favorite site feeds, but I will ignore that for this post.
In order to take advantage of these feeds, go to www.google.com and click on the link in the upper right hand corner that says "Personalized Home" This will take you to a screen - similar in appeareance to the Google homepage, yet with extra information displayed.
From there, either sign in with your google account (hopefully you already have one) or, click "Personalize Homepage." Clicking that link will help you create a personalized homepage without creating a google account. However, that homepage will only be viewable on the computer is was created with...unless you use your google account.
When you click the "Personalize Homepage" button (after signing in to your google account), click the "Add Content" button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. There are several RSS feeds alread available there, so please feel free to experiment and see what you like. To use your Google Homepage with the blogs, click inside the text box right beneath the "Search by topic of feed URL."
Here comes the fun part. Type the address of the blog, i.e. http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Thats all there is to it. The name of your blog + /atom.xml
A little box will be added to the homepage with links to the 3 most recently published posts from that blog. 3 is the default number, but can be changes to as many as 9 and as few as 1. I use this system to keep up with all the many blogs I visit. This way, I can check for new posts on ALL the blogs from one page, without checking through four or more blogs from a favorites window.
Anyway, enjoy the added functionality, and feel free to comment this post with any questions or problems encountered. Enjoy!
Yeah, that stuff is cool. I reckon I should use it.
i LOVE this feature. i've added all the blogs since you helped me. maybe if i play around with it i can figure even more stuff out! =) oh...and i customized my weather!
Ahh excellent! All it takes is a little work and you're already a pro at this RSS feed stuff!
I really enjoy playing around with stuff like this...as you can tell by the nature of my posts :)
Just for kicks and giggles, check out the icon next to the URL. It should be a small picture of a Wake Forest symbol. That was another neat little thing I picked up from working on dad's website.
You're amazing, Adam! Cool stuff!
i actually noticed that yesterday. very cool! cory might actually blog if he could have a cool tarheel thing on his site....well, probably not! but he would think it was neat! =)
Yeah, I have had several different favicons for pickapeck but there isn't one now. IE does not support them as well as Firefox.
Yeah, i've kinda been annoyed by IE lately. FireFox and IE each have their strengths, but favicon support is not IE's
IE has zero strengths IMO.