Scrapblog Series : Bloglines Tutorial (Part 4)

Setting Up and Using Bloglines

A Scrapblogging Series Tutorial

Part 4 of 8

 

Go Back to Part 3 | Go To Part 5 | Go To Part 8 (PDF Downloadable File)

Subscribing to Feeds

Option 1 : The Subscribe Bookmarklet

The Subscribe Bookmarklet is the best tool ever. Get it, and use it.

Step	Action
1.	There are two ways to get this bookmarklet. You can choose the link from the bottom of the left hand panel, Or from the tips notes on the right.
2.	We’ll choose the left hand link Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet, which gives you the following page.
3.	As you can see, you can get a bookmarklet Sub with Bloglines button for several browsers. I use both IE and Firefox, and both work well. Follow the directions on the page to drag the button onto your browser Favourites or Bookmarks links. Here is mine, sitting in my Firefox Browser.
4.	Let’s try it out. First, Log Out of Bloglines. Then browse to a Scrapblog you might like to subscribe to. Let’s choose one of the most popular blogs out there, that of Ali Edwards. Go to this URL - http://aliedwards.typepad.com/
5.	Now that the blog is in your browser – in this case, with Firefox, it’s in a tab – you can click on the Subscribe with Bloglines bookmarklet button. And you are taken to the logon screen for Bloglines .   Note: If you did not logout of Bloglines before this, or have allowed password cookies to be kept on your PC, you may find yourself immediately into the next screen. But from this login screen, note that the blog URL you are trying to subscribe to, is still up there in the address box anyway. You haven’t lost it.
6	Log On to Bloglines.   And here we have all the possible feeds that Bloglines recognises. Ali Edwards has three feeds going on – an Atom Feed, an RSS Feed, and an Index. If there is an Atom Feed, go for that one – they contain richer content than RSS feeds. Don’t go for the Index, it’s not helpful. To work out which one you want, you may want to preview the feed first. Click on the Preview this Feed link against one of the feeds.   This is the Atom Feed – it will show the images inserted in the blog entry also.
7	This Atom Feed is the one I want. I could press the Subscribe button top left and proceed from there. Or I could take you back to the initial screen to show you another way. Press the ß Back Browser button.
8.	On the Available Feeds window, select the Subscribe To This Feed checkbox against the feed you want (in this case, the Atom feed, which we’ve just previewed) and input the folder name and other details below.   Once finished, click the Subscribe button.
9	And there the blog is, complete with the unread entries, ready to go.

Option 2 : Add Option within Bloglines / Finding the XML Feed Link

Actually, you’ve done this already. See Part 3 / Option 3 – Exploring the Other Options in the Left Hand Lane.

Step	Action
1.	So, where do you get the XML feed URLs to input into Bloglines with the Add option? On a blog, look for something like – XML Feed RSS Feed Atom Feed A Button which might look like these –   Note: lots of XML feed aggregators (the Yahoo buttons above are great examples) provide their own buttons. Although clicking these on the blog will take you to MyYahoo (if you have an account), the actual feed URL for the blog can also be gained from these buttons.
2	So, you’ve found a button which shows there is an XML feed – either RSS or Atom normally. Or you’ve found a link called RSS or XML or similar. You now need to copy the actual feed URL link from these. Depending on the browser you are using, you can normally copy this URL link by – Right clicking and selecting Copy Link (Copy Link location in Firefox) or Right clicking and Copy Shortcut for Internet Explorer.
3.	Logon to Bloglines. Click on the Add option from the left hand pane. Click in the field box for Blog or Feed URL and paste in the URL you’ve copied from step 2 above. Ctrl+V should do the trick.   And click on Subscribe once it’s in there.

Option 3 : When You’re Having Problems finding the Feed URL

Actually, sometimes there is no feed URL. Some bloggers are ignorant of the option to turn on XML feeds, or may have chosen to not have these on.

Step

Action

1.

Sometimes, despite Blogline’s great ability to automatically detect the feeds when you are at a blog and you choose to use the Sub with Bloglines bookmarklet button (see Option 1), you will find a Can Not Find Feed message within bloglines. I’ll show you what I mean. This is using a great forum community site – let’s pretend I think it’s a blog and it therefore might have an XML feed I could subscribe to. I browse to this site – http://www.twopeasinabucket.com And once there, I’ll click on my Sub With Bloglines bookmarklet in my browser (or alternatively, I could copy the URL and insert this into Bloglines Add directly)

Option 4 : All Kinds of Different Feeds to Subscribe To

Step	Action
1.	Community Forums Well, we know that 2Peas doesn’t have a feed, but you’ll be surprised what community forums do have live feeds you can subscribe to. Take a look at the homepage of UKScrappers for instance - http://www.ukscrappers.co.uk and you will find an RSS2.0 feed of all the latest community posts – you can see these ticking over on the homepage, and this ticker is fed out to the general public.
2.	Yahoo Groups Some yahoo groups provide XML feeds, either of their latest posts in the group or a post which acts as a newsletter. For digital scrapbookers, try this example – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rakscraps/ The Rakscraps group homepage shows the orange XML button on it. Click on the What’s This? Link beside the button (once you’ve joined the group, of course) and you’ll find an FAQ page with the actual Feed URL at the bottom. You can Add this to Bloglines. If you’re an active Yahoo Group member, and read a lot of these, consider asking the group moderator to turn on the RSS or XML options on this group. Many aren’t aware they can, or what benefits this can have.
3a.	Flickr Albums Flickr operates with tags. And you can subscribe to tags in Bloglines. First, go to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/
3b.	Click on the popular tags link, and from the next page , input Scrapbook and click on Search . This is too wide a search, as many people are using the term Scrapbook to define just a set of their photographs now. Click on Clustering Goodness to see some other associated options for Scrapbook – you can now choose to drill down into the tag, Scrapbooking, or perhaps take a look at an associated craft like Art Journals.
3c.	Once you’ve found the tag you want (mine is artjournal) if you look down at the very bottom of a group of photos within that tag, you will find the XML feed buttons making an appearance.   Take a copy of the XML Feed link from these links or buttons and input this into Bloglines (as per the Option 2 steps above)
3d.	Once subscribed, I have my new flickr subscription, complete with images, all ready in my Bloglines account.
4	News Feeds Many news services provide copious XML feeds to subscribe to. Goto MSN, BBC or ABC websites and you’ll find a plethora of them. All you need to find is the URL for the feed, and you can subscribe.
5	Search Feeds Bloglines itself provides some ease in searching for a topic feed. Within Bloglines, click on Add and you’ll notice the News Section link at the top right. Or a Search link. Try these out, input some key words, and see what is found. You can then subscribe to the keyword search. Search Feeds elsewhere also can provide RSS feeds for these searches, which you can subscribe to. Try a search on a topic at http://www.feedster.com
6	Podcasts Podcasts can be subscribed to, of course. So they can be subscribed to within Bloglines also. This doesn’t mean that you will have the podcast suddenly coming out through Bloglines – most casts have a blog entry including the actual pod link, and shownotes etc – these will appear as new entries in Bloglines informing you that a new podcast is up and ready to download.