Tag Archives | feeds

4 Favorite Totally Random Feeds

Feed IconI was just clearing out some of my feeds that I am subscribed to – and thought now would be as good of a time as any to list some of my favorite feeds that I subscribe do.

Weblog Tool Collection – Loads of good WordPress news, themes and plugins all in one spot. [RSS Feed]

Unclutterer – Unclutterer.com is a site on personal organization, simple living, and getting rid of clutter. [RSS Feed]

NoDQ.com – This is one of the many pro wrestling (WWE, TNA, MMA) news and rumor web sites out there. Doesn’t have a feed, so I created this one with FeedYes.com. [RSS Feed]

Lorelle on WordPress – Yet another good WordPress and just general writing tips blog that I get a lot of use and information out of. [RSS Feed]

Now back to deleting some of the feeds out of Google Reader I don’t like as much as the ones above. :)

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Free iPhone Giveaway!

Well I would give one away if I had one. Personally, I want to thank Apple for allowing me to skip out on reading and feeds today because I can’t freaking turn around without seeing another “I’m Getting an iPhone Man!” posts today.

I’m not bitter though, instead of fighting the noise – I’ll just contribute to it. :)

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Productive Google Reader Tips

Google ReaderSince everybody seemed to enjoy my Get More From Google Reader Guide, I figured it was about time for a sequel. Although a lot of things were covered there, I did not get into many tips that will make Google Reader more usable. Here are a few productivity tips that should help you get through your feeds a little faster.

Expanded View Link

Google Reader Tip 1 : Use Expanded View – I like expanded view because it makes it very easy to scroll through all the feed items and speed read my way through them. No I don’t read every single item from every single feed. I quickly browse and watch for things that get my attention.

Google Reader Tip 2 : Use the “J” Button to Go From Item to Item – Now you could scroll down or use the down arrow key to slowly make your way down the list. If you want to skip down to the next entry though, all you need to do is hit the “J” key. If you want to go backwards, use the “K” key to go back to the previous post you have already viewed. (awesome keyboard photo by paolovalde via Flickr)

Wide View

Google Reader Tip 3 : Ditch the Sidebar to Get More Reading Room – To hide the sidebar that shows your lables and links, just hit the “U” key. This will give you even more room to read when you have a long list of feed entries to go through. To un-hide it, just hit the “U” key again. Get more keyboard shortcuts here.

Get New Items First

Google Reader Tip 4 : Get the New Stuff First – I don’t need to see the home page for Google Reader when I want to go catch up on my RSS feeds. Click on the link for “Settings” and then “Preferences” and find where it says “Start Page”. Here you can select what page or selection of labels you will start looking through when Google Reader starts up. I have mine set on “All Items”.

Reader Trends

Google Reader Tip 5 : Watch Your Feed Reading Trends – If you point your browser towards the Google Reader Trends link you can see a plethora of information about how you read your feeds. You can see popular tags, subscription trends, and reading trends. Seeing what time of the day you check your feeds is cool. They will give you the most popular day of the week for your feed reading ways as well. You can also see the number of posts you have read per day in the last 30 days.

Starred Items

Google Reader Tip 6 : Star Items to Save for Later – I subscribe to a lot of wallpaper related RSS feeds, so when I find one I like – I might not have time to save the wallpaper at this very moment. That is where “staring” entries in the Google Reader can be helpful. You can do so by clicking the star icon at the bottom of any entry. To view all the ones you have starred, click on the “Starred Items” link on your left sidebar.

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Plug Your Yahoo Pipe into FeedBurner

Yesterday I told you how to create a mega ego feed using Yahoo! Pipes. As I told you then, the RSS feed that it spits out is really ugly. Don’t you wish you could make it something you could at least remember or make easier to type out? Thanks to FeedBurner you can.

Step #1 – Get That Ugly Pipe RSS Feed Address

Yahoo! PipesFirst thing you need to do is get the RSS feed for your pipe you created. You can do that by going to the Yahoo! Pipes Web site, click “my pipes”, click on the name of your pipe, and then clicking on “Run this Pipe”. From there click on “Subscribe” and select the RSS output option (Get as RSS).

If you need an easier method, or you missed a click in there, take this URL and replace “yourpipeid” with the random spew of letters and numbers Yahoo gives you to identify your pipe.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=yourpipeid&_render=rss

Make sure you have that copied to your clipboard (in Windows higlight it all, right-click and select copy) so you can paste it in our next step.

Step #2 – Plug the Ugly Feed Address Into FeedBurner

FeedBurnerNow that you have your ugly RSS feed in hand, point your browser towards FeedBurner.com. Paste your ugly RSS feed into the text box on FeedBurner’s Web site and click on the “Next” button. From there you will walk through the steps of creating a FeedBurner feed to replace your hideous pipe feed.

What does the final result look like? Well I created an ego feed of my own via Yahoo! Pipes, plugged it into FeedBurner and ended up with the Mega Mitch Feed.

Now from there, you can use FeedBurner to customize the look and feel of your feed and add all kinds of neat functionality to it.

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Create an Ego Feed With Yahoo Pipes

If you find yourself writing for multiple places and having multiple Web sites, it can become very hard to track everything that you do. Sure you have an RSS feed for this project and and RSS feed for that project, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one super RSS feed – if only for your own egotistical reasons? Gather your RSS feeds and head over to Yahoo! Pipes and I will show you how to get it done.

Create a Pipe!

First thing you need to do is point your browser towards Yahoo! Pipes and click on “Create a Pipe”. After doing that you will see a big confusing interface you can not make heads or tails from. Don’t worry. Just click on “Fetch Feed” and drag it over to your right (onto the grid).

Drag and Drop Fetch Feeds!

Next you will want to click on the “+” graphic next to URL to add more feeds to the list. Click it once for every feed you would like to group together as one.

Sort Your Feed Items!

After that, you will need to sort your mega feed by date, so it looks like a regular ol’ RSS feed. To do that, click on “Operators” on the left sidebar and then drag and drop “Sort” onto the grid. Don’t worry if this looks messy, you don’t get any points for making it look nice yet.

On the box that says “Sort” you are going to want to select “Publication Date” on the drop down box. In the next drop down box you see (to the right of the first one) you need to select “descending” as the order you would like your feed to be displayed. That will cause all of the newest entries on your feed to be displayed at the top.

Connect the Dots!

Next, you see that little circle under each of the boxes you have created? You need to connect them all together so they will work as one. Start with the “Feed Fetch” box. Drag the little circle down to down to the top of “Sort”. If you did it correctly you should see a blue line connecting the two now. Next click on the circle under “Sort” and connect it to the circle on top of “Pipe Output”.

Your almost done! In the upper right corner you should see a button that says “Publish”. Click that. A new box will come up and give you a lot of information to fill out about your feed. You can name it, put a description and some keywords. After doing that, click “Publish” at the bottom of that box.

Fill in the Blanks!

Now click on the link that says “Back to My Pipes”. If everything was done correctly you should now see your newly created pipe listed there. Click on the name of your pipe and you can see a lot of information about it. The next thing you want to do is hit the “Run this Pipe” link.

Run Your New Pipe!

Now you should see a Web page representation of your mega feed. Click on the link that says “Subscribe” and you will be given a list of options to choose from. There are a great number of ways you can keep up to date with this feed.

The one you pick is up to you. Here is the final product for the mega ego feed that I created! Neat, hu?

Yahoo! PipesSo now you have your own egotistical RSS feed to keep track of all of your different posts to all these different places. Even if you don’t have as many blogs or write at as many places as I do – you can still make use of this tool. You could combine your del.icio.us links and your Flickr feeds to keep track of your favorite links and photos. You could get the RSS feeds for all your friends’ blogs on MySpace and make one feed to track them all. The only limit is needing an RSS feed and your imagination.

+ Now Learn How To Plug That UGLY Feed Address Into FeedBurner!

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Get More From Google Reader Guide

Google Reader

+ More Google Reader Tips!

Ever since Google moved Google Reader over to the newer, cleaner and better design I have been using it to handle all of my feed reading. I have gone from FeedDemon, to Newsgator, to Rojo to Google Reader – so I have tried a lot. Google Reader beats the rest of them hands down.

While using it to browse through my RSS feeds I have run across more than a few external tools to help you get more out of Google Reader.

Continue Reading →

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

What Yahoo Mail Needs

The Yahoo Mail team came out with some excellent tips for searching my E-mails in the new Yahoo Mail Beta that has been out for a while now. I really love the new Yahoo Mail, but there are a few things that I wish they would hurry up and finish or do.

1. I want a better RSS feed reader. The one included right now sucks. Give me something like Google Reader and I will switch in an instant. It would be nice to have my mail and RSS feeds all in one spot, but right now when it comes to RSS Google is just giving me a lot more.

2. Let’s hurry up and get Calendar and Notepad working. I never really used these features in the old Yahoo! Mail, so give me something that is worth using. If you do not, then at least give me the option of getting rid of the buttons. (That could also be said for the RSS reader)

3. Give me the option to always reply in plain text. I really don’t like having to switch back to plain text every time I reply to a message. There should be a setting in the options somewhere that says “only send E-mail with plain text”. Get that in there and I would be happy.

Have anything else that needs to be done that I might have missed?

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Feed Reading Not There Yet

Sure, feed reading and RSS in general has gone a long way since the early days, but I do not think it is “there” yet. I was reading about the review of the current feed reading habits, and it does show promise.

I just can’t believe anything has caught on yet till my Mom thinks it is easy. Now she is “mid” tech savvy, and I think that is the world’s target with this stuff. When people outside of the tech sphere really find a good reason to use this stuff then we are all going to be doing a little ‘bit better.

Then again, when you mention Web 2.0, RSS, feeds or blogosphere to normal people, they still look at you like your crazy. We may have blogging Gods on the Web – but in normal life, they are just another loser with a habit that nobody understands.

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Top 5 Web Hosting Industry Blogs

I have been maybe the loudest voice when it comes to Web hosts and Web hosting related services needing to blog, and it sounds like finally somebody has been listening. A year or two ago when I started talking about this, there was maybe two or three Web hosting blogs out there. Now the numbers have grown.

The numbers have grown enough to where I can actually do a top five list without feeling like I have to make half of them up.

The WHIR Blogs

OK, so maybe this isn’t just one blog – but I am going to sum them all up together, because they do give you the nice option of subscribing to all of them at once if you would like. Now what is so great about The WHIR’s Blog?

Well they give you a lot of interesting voices and views from the Web hosting industry. They have some voices from one side and other voices from another. The thing some people don’t understand is Web hosting is a really big tent – and the WHIR Blogs try to fit a lot of the industry biggest spots under their feed.

Amy’s Blog

Amy Armitage (from Lunarpages.com) has a nice blog that I would say is the closest thing to a professional blog Lunarpages has got.

I like the feeling of the whole thing. It has a much more personal feeling to it, and shows that Web hosting doesn’t always have to be about servers and uptime. You can create interesting Web hosting content without feeling like you are putting folks to sleep.

FastServers’s Blog

The folks over at FastServers.net also have a blog for both industry insiders and folks interested in the world of Web hosting to check out and read. Now the content here usually is a little more business focused, but that is OK too.

It gives you a secret window to look through when it comes to running an impressive data center. With multiple authors and interesting content – there is a lot of promise for this company blog to do great things in the future.

Inside ISPCON and HostingCon Blog

The two most important conferences inside of the Web hosting industry both have blogs as well. Now some of the content might be more relative the closer you get to the events, but there is more than enough content to read through and keep you happy all year long.

Both also have podcast content of the conferences as well.

Now sure, that isn’t all of the Web hosting blogs out there – but most of the best ones have been listed. If you need some more hosting content in your RSS reader, check out these Web sites as well. If you have one I didn’t mention, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

Oh yeah, just as a final reminder – you can’t forget about one of the best blogs/podcasts out there today for the Web hosting industry, the Web Hosting Show!

Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Rojo Blows, News Alloy Saves!

Since the new Rojo is extremely buggy, I have had to move feed readers yet again. This time around I think I have found a keeper. NewsAlloy.com is one of the quickest and cleanest Web-based feed readers I have seen in a while.

topnews_logo.gifI had no problem importing my OPML list into News Alloy, and once I did I was ready to go. You see, I like to see a long list of entries in my feed reader that I can scan down. Once I have reached the bottom, I want to be able to get rid of them for good. It is such a simple idea, I don’t know why more Online feed readers don’t provide this simple view aspect.

Another nice thing I liked about this service is it didn’t choke on my number of RSS feeds that I subscribe to.

So if you are looking for a quick and reliable way of going through your feeds, give News Alloy a shot.

Read full story · Comments { 0 }