Something Different RSS Feeds, What they do.

I am in a position of needing/wanting to keep track of what is being written by our community on our sites and the comments that you make. I am going to go through and show how I made "shortcuts" for keeping track of blogs. I know this is simple for some people, but I really haven't seen a "starter" description of RSS anywhere. If I had, I might have been using it a lot sooner.

In the address window of the browser you will see an "RSS" button at the far right of the screen. When you click on that (RSS) button it takes you to a text page. You want to bookmark that page. Your browser will now put a number behind the bookmark telling you how many new posts are on the page when you start the browser.

I have put a folder on my bookmarks bar to put these in. When I start up the folder carries the number of new posts in it telling me there is new stuff to read.

Many of the pages also allow you to use an RSS feed on the comments as well. Really useful on the dsbeta board. I could not find an easy way to bookmark the RSS comments, so the following works on blogger but not live journal.

Start by looking at the info in the address window when you are looking at the RSS feed page for Mark's Daily Thoughts. It looks like:
feed://marksdailylife.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

To get the comments feed you need to delete the (posts/default?alt=rss) part of the address. Type in (comments/default) instead. You end up with the following in the address bar:
feed://marksdailylife.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

Once it is typed in the address bar, you "click" on return and you will be on the RSS feed for the comments of the page. Bookmark that page and name it something like "Mark's Daily Comments". You can now quickly see what new comments have been posted by me and what new comments have been added.

The comments tracking works on Blogger. I have not found a way to do that on Live Journal, but if anyone knows that one, I, and others, would like to know it.

Enjoy!