RSS feeds… March 28

Filed under hacks, tech by blalond | 1 comment |

Hello heightstodepths blog!

It’s been since September!?! Time flies. I’ve been telling myself to just post more often, especially when I run across a new hack that works well. Well here’s the latest hack.

Who uses RSS out there? It’s “Really Simple Syndication,” but I guess it’s not so simple since not so many people use it. But I use it and it’s fun.

The idea is that when you see the orange rss thing rss you can hit it and then you’ll stay up-to-date on that site’s new information. It’s a bit like my “subscribe by email to h2d” on the right, but it’s more user-friendly because you manage all your “feeds” in one spot. Confused yet?

How do I keep up-to-date on various RSS feeds?

I use FeedBlitz.com. It emails me once a day with a report of all the content of the posts from the websites to which I’m subscribed (currently 94 total, geesh). You can sign-up for free. That would be step 1.

Step 2 would be to set-up your browser (Firefox, of course) to show you a little orange rss thing rss in the address bar at the top whenever you’re browsing a site to which you could subscribe. You just hit that whenever you want to add the current site to your list. Here’s where the hack-part comes in:

1. In the Tools:Options… menu, you’ll find a tab called “Feeds.” Click that.
2. Then choose “Subscribe to the feed using…” and just choose Google for now. Hit OK.
3. Put “about:config” in the address bar of the browser, hit enter.
4. In the Filter: line put “browser.feeds.handlers.webservice” and hit enter.
5. You should see under “Value” on the right “http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=%”
6. Double click that and replace it with “http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Track=%s&email=your-email@dot.com” replacing “your-email@dot.com” with your email address. Hit OK.
7. Test it out on your favorite website by clicking the rss in the address bar at the top.

The hack part is that I added &email=your-email@dot.com to the line above… and whatnot. I couldn’t find out how to do this with Feedblitz anywhere out there, so I had to invent a hack. That’s a digression on the definition of a hack, though.

Maybe the instructions over here achieve the same thing, but there you go… www.feedblitz.com/downloads.asp

1 comment

  1. blalond Dec 9

    Google Chrome now has an extension to allow RSS subscription. It’s right over here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd

    I’m using it to subscribe to Feeds using Feedblitz. I set it up for that with this url: http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Track=%s&email=your-email@dot.com

    (with this chrome extension, to add a custom RSS service, just add this extension, visit a rss site, hit the orange rss logo to subscribe, select “Add new…” from the dropdown, use the url above)

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