Over the last few days, besides going to the sensational State of Origin match last night, I’ve been playing with a new (for me) blog tool. Using del.icio.us and RSS Digest, I have set up feeds off my blog where I can show the headings of articles and blog posts I read and think others might like to read.
This was all pretty simple to do, and free (though RSS Digest is donorware – and a great service), but will it prove to be any use to anyone but me?
Linkblogs are, of course, a good way to keep track of your own reading and work as an external brain (as the jargon du jour goes) and adding an RSS feed is just an easy extra step.
What do you think about this sort of stuff – does it add to blogs or just clutter up the sidebar?
About flycook
http://trevorcook.typepad.com
On my own site I have a feedburner page in which I have various RSS feeds shown on my own site so I can get my quick update of what is going on with a few websites. I love it, and for those running WordPress it is easy to do.
Since a lot of my site involves linking to newspaper articles around Boston, I’ve set up a couple pages of feeds for other cities, so that my readers can keep up with the sports news in New York city and San Francisco.
I’ve found that these pages are sometimes a little slow to load, though I’m not using RSS Digest.
The same advice they gave me for RW, “don’t invite her unless you’re married,” and the same with RSS feeds. If you run more than blogroll with a site you’re not completely connected to, you’re wasting your real estate.
I was using RSS Digest for del.icio.us links on most of my blogs but I recently removed them because they were slowing down the page load quite a bit…I do like the idea of using RSS feeds on perhaps a sub-page though : )
Hmmm, that’s giving me some ideas…
I’ve got a links blog and a web design blog… it’s fine if nobody gets the links blog but it’s there if they do. I treat them quite seperately.
Pig Work http://www.pigwork.info
Pig Pen http://www.pigpen.info
Why do I have a links blog? Well it allows me to show designers and so forth stuff I think is relevant. They’re manually found links as I research during the day I guess. When uni starts back up the number will probably fade somewhat but it also gives me a bank of links and helpful stuff that I can use or refer clients or co workers to read or look at. But I know for some reason link blogs have a bad name.
Look at it as free advertising because I feel like it lol. I think links blogs are cool anyway so give it a go. Try the separate site route.
I think it’s a great idea. I occasionally follow several people’s links on FURL and del.icio.us, but with RSS I could just add those feeds to Bloglines. (HT to you Darren for talking up Bloglines. It’s great.)
Peter Cooper from RSS Digest here. Thanks for the mention.
Cary, this is an issue which we have addressed, and we’re faster than ever, but, sadly, this is the nature of Javascript includes. That said, for RSS Digest which launches next month, we have an optional system for people who can run PHP scripts on their site.. which will cache RSS Digest’s data for you, and mean you get instant results all the time.. even if RSS Digest is down! This might be the solution everyone is looking for ;-)
Cool…thanks for the info Peter : ) I’ll check it out…
If you use Jots.com to save your bookmarks instead of del.icio.us (or use both!), Jots can automatically post an article daily to your blog with all your bookmarks and comments for the previous day.
So, all bookmarks for one day complete with tags and comments in one post daily.
Thanks svartling – Jots.com looks great, I got it up and running within minutes of reading your comment.
@flycoook:
Yeah Jots is a really nice looking bookmark service and it has some tools that others don’t have.
Please check out the sites on- Tons of interesdting stuff!!!