BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
ORGANIZING YOUR FEEDS IN FOLDERS |
Google’s home page personalization is much younger and less evolved than My Yahoo!, but offers an uncluttered page upon which to display feeds. Whichever newsreader you use, there are important features to keep in mind: It is important to organize your feeds, and folders help keep your topics straight. Tags: Tags are an alternative organizing feature. Tags and folders tend to exclude each other; a service that uses one probably doesn’t use the other. Tags are arguably more flexible because one feed can be assigned more than one tag. So, a feed from your sister’s blog that contains many pictures of dogs might be tagged family, pictures, and dogs. Those tags put the feed in three virtual folders simultaneously. Search: Being allowed to perform keyword searches of your feeds is essential. Along with that function, the search box should be able to also prowl through the blogosphere for content that matches your keywords.
Still, the newsreader should supply a method of searching for feeds from the information universe and even a directory of popular feeds in which to browse.
Tracking and backtracking: A good newsreader keeps track of which items in a feed you have looked at and doesn’t show them to you twice or marks them as having been read. And if you want to see hidden, already read entries, the newsreader should have a way to show them to you. Bloglines, for example, lets you look back in time by increments of a day or a week.
Feed display options: Feed providers (the Web sites whose feeds you subscribe to) sometimes shorten their feed entries by allowing only excerpted entries into the feed; readers must click the feed headline to see the entire entry on its Web page. Most blogs furnish full entries in the feed, so you don’t have to click through. Full entries are more convenient than partial entries, but many people prefer to scan headlines only, clicking through to see entries of interest. The newsreader should offer this compression from full entry to headline only as a display option.
Ideally, it should be easy to switch back and forth. Ideal also is the ability to set this choice separately for each feed. Resorting and retagging: Whether the newsreader uses folders or tags (don’t choose a newsreader that uses neither), you should be able to revise your initial sorting choices. Moving feeds from folder to folder is generally more cumbersome than retagging but worth it to users who prefer the folder method of organizing (which closely resembles how files are organized in the Windows operating system). Tagging systems should allow you to add multiple tags at one time and erase previously set tags.
Your selected newsreader might word this feature a little differently. You might not be using a newsreader yet, and I describe how they work and how to get them later in this chapter. For now, imagine you have one. In your newsreader, click Finish or OK to add the feed to your collection. The newsreader might give you the opportunity to put the feed into a folder if you divide your feeds into folders, or to tag the feed by keyword if your newsreader uses tags.
The important point is to right-click that XML chicklet and copy and paste the link into your newsreader.
Subscription buttons for specific newsreaders In their eagerness to promote their feeds, some bloggers and other publishers put newsreader-specific feed buttons on their pages. Contrary to XML/RSS chicklets, these buttons want to be clicked — left-clicked in the normal fashion. Doing so brings up the Web newsreader represented by the button and starts the subscription process unique to that newsreader. In cases where the subscription process is quite simple, the feed might simply be added with no more action on your part. In newsreaders that always allow you to choose which folder a new feed is placed in, or which tags are assigned to it, that assignment page is displayed with the correct feed address already plugged in.