Simple Safari News Aggregation
October 9, 2006 | Leave a Comment
If you are trying to stay up to date on multiple news sites or blogs, you already respect the power of RSS. I’ve been asked a lot about what I use for aggregation on the Mac. I’ve homegrown a quick and dirty little web-reader of my own, but I’m often tempted to use Safari’s amazing built-in aggregation ability.
A regular reader URL looks like this: feeds:nosheep.net/feed/
You may have discovered that when clicking the blue RSS link on the right of the URL bar. The more powerful aggregation can be found by creating a folder of RSS bookmarks. When you do this, you get the option to “View All RSS Articles”.
This creates a URL like: feeds:My%20News&nosheep.net/feed/&www.lifeaftercoffee.com/feed/atom/&borkweb.com/feed/
Each feed URL is delimited with a simple ampersand. You can extend this for as many feeds as you want. To get even cooler, add that link to your bookmark bar. As new articles are posted in any of the feeds, a little number will count up next to the bookmark for each unread article. This makes it easy to know when there is new stuff to read.
Tags: atom, bookmarks, feed, feeds, rss, safari
FeedBurner
May 18, 2006 | 5 Comments
Reading an article about Blog optimization yesterday (I lost the link…), I was pointed at a service called FeedBurner. Basically you install a plugin that takes over managing your RSS feed. So, you’re thinking, “I have an RSS feed, it works, who cares?” Well I thought the same thing and this is what sparked my curiosity.
It turns out FeedBurner rocks!
Before I go to far into why I love this service, first let me say, it is a breeze to install and enable. So, not trying it out is just plain lazy. If you don’t like it, come back and tell me why in the comments, but anyway, it’s easy to install so have at it.
The first of the two main features I like is getting statistics on who’s reading and clicking through to my stuff from feeds. The graphs are pretty and I now have an idea about readership through readers.
The second is the cool stuff they can add to the bottom of articles in feeds. Open up your reader and look at my feed. Along the bottom are some links like “Add a Comment”, “Email This”, “Digg This!”, etc. You can have FeedBurner add all kinds of sweet stuff to your articles, these are called FeedFlares.
My final comment on the service is that the overall style of the interface they use is awesome. Their help text is personable and entertaining while pointing useful things out and giving great help.
Tags: aggregate, blog, blogging, feed, feed burner, feedburner, feedflare, plugin, rss, wordpress