A quick question for any readers who would like to weigh in.
Now that you can see a list of all 12 of the parent categories on the sidebar, we’re wondering: If we can figure out how to do it: would you be interested in the possibility of individual RSS feeds for any or all of these 12 categories? (e.g. to get only the Anglican / Episcopal stories)
If there’s interest, we can see about setting up such feeds.
In the meantime, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for all T19 entries here. The Atom feed is here.
I’ve been puzzled by those orange and blue button thingies for some time, not only here but on other webpages – what they can do and how they work. RSS sounds wonderful, whatever it is.
Could someone please point this dinosaur to somewhere where all this stuff is explained?
Hey Pageantmaster, we’ll be doing a Daily Blog Tip later this week on RSS feeds, what they are and what you can do with them.
Part of the answer depends on what internet browser you’re using. (Some of the newer browsers such as Firefox 2.0 have special support for RSS subscriptions)
Here’s a brief definition of what an RSS feed is from Wikipedia:
Some examples of “feed readers” include:
Google: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/
This elf has about 260 blogs and news feeds entered into bloglines. (more than half of those related to Anglican news & blogs). Basically I can go to one page and see which of the blogs I follow has new entries, and I can quickly skim those entries without having to go to the blog itself.
Bottlomline: Consider it a personal headline service.
Most RSS feed-readers or aggregators are VERY easy to use.
For instance to subscribe to T19’s RSS feed in one of these feed readers, you would right click on the little orange button in the T19 sidebar and choose (copy link location or copy shortcut).
Then in the box or window where the feed reader asks you for the feed of the site you want to subscribe to, you would right click again to paste in the link. Many feedreaders make it even easier, however. If you tell them you want to subscribe to Titusonenine (www.kendallharmon.net), they’ll search the web for you and then give you a list of available feeds you can choose from.
RSS feeds are available for most Anglican blogs, weather services (this time of year the National Hurricane Center Atlantic tropical update is at the very top of my bloglines page), mainstream newspapers (usually broken down into categories like sports news, financial, local, international, etc.), etc. etc. etc., even the daily office Scripture readings (in the English Standard Version translation of Scripture).
RSS feeds have been a lifesaver for this elf in terms of helping to cut down on the time we need to follow blogs and news. Definitely something fun to play with and learn about, in our opinion.
Much appreciated ever-helpful elf. I.E. me, but I know many people particularly in the US rate Firefox, but I have been a bit cautious as I think I gathered there was a somewhat intrusive Mozilla aspect, but expect I have got this wrong.
Thanks a lot.
PM
Now that I’ve given an overview of what an RSS feed is and how you can subscribe to an RSS feed, here, just FYI are the breakdowns of how many posts would have shown up per category yesterday if we’d had an RSS feed set up for each T19 parent category:
All T19 posts for June 4: 21 articles
Admin: 2 articles
Anglican: 10 articles
By Kendall: 0 articles
Christian Life / Church Life: 0 articles
Culture Watch: 7 articles
Economics / Politics: 2 articles
General Interest: 2 articles
International News/Commentary: 3 articles
Religion News/Commentary: 2 articles
Resources & Links: 1 article
South Carolina: 0 articles
Theology: 1 article
(since there is overlap among categories, the total of the articles in all categories is greater than the total number of posts for June 4)
In Advanced Search, you can do searches by each of the parent categories and subcategories. That would give you a good idea whether you might be interested in a specialized RSS feed.
If someone has a particular need for an RSS feed for a specific topic or subcategory, let us know. We can probably work with you to create what you need.
One idea that comes to mind of a sub-category that might be particularly useful is our new category “Anglican: Primary Source” which is focused on letters, statements, reports and communiques from primates, bishops, organizations. It would filter out the news stories and commentary and give you just the individual statements. Something to think about.
(An RSS feed is essentially a summary list of what’s new on a web site. In effect it is a special page of the web site that is updated – usually automatically – when new things appear. All modern browsers (IE7, Firefox, Opera – the latter strongly recommended) have the facility to subscribe to these RSS pages or “feeds”. When you subscribe, you effectively tell your browser to fetch the RSS data on a regular schedule. Then you can look over it at leisure and follow links to what particularly interests you.)
I would support by-category RSS feeds but, even more, RSS feeds for the comments to individual posts (feeds offering all comments to all posts would not be useful), as an alternative to e-mail notifications.
CPKS, so far we’ve not found any documentation about how to RSS feed for comments here. Whether ALL comments (which would be very helpful for us elves) or by post.
If there’s anyone out there who knows Expression Engine and knows how to set up RSS Feed for Comments, PLEASE let us know! Thanks.