September 7, 2010

Using the RSS power of Blogger (Blogspot)

RSS is THE technology to stay up to date in the blogsphere. Here is a quick tip for you bloggers out there who want to use RSS to the extreme.
Everyone knows that all new posts can be subscribed to by the general RSS feed. The path to this feed is easy to find from the "subscribe to posts" link which for my blog is:
 http://pricelesselectricalactivity.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

In Blogger settings you can prefer to have an email sent whenever a new comment is written. You might want to have it in your RSS reader instead - or even create a gadget to stream it in some custom way, the possibilities are endless. The path to the RSS comments feed is:
 http://pricelesselectricalactivity.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

or if you want to watch comments for a specific post:
http://pricelesselectricalactivity.blogspot.com/feeds/6234880912964361746/comments/default
Those numbers there are the postID, which is a unique identification number for each individual post and is found in the address bar when you edit the post (actually you can also find your blog ID in the very same address).
Blogger and Blogspot are to the user the same though under the hood, Blogger is a free publishing platform, while Blogspot is a free domain service provider. If you are craving for the details you can read more about it here.
In some blogs you may get overloaded with posts that you do not care about at all and you just want to read about a particular subject. Say, for example, that you only want to subscribe to my IT-tips which I tag specifically. Well it turns out that Blogger can actually give you feeds by tags, you only need to dig up the URL which is well hidden under the turf. The URL then is:
 http://www.blogger.com/feeds/[yourblogID]/posts/[feedType]/-/[labelName]

Hmm that wasn't as easy! Well you know already how to find the [yourblogID] from the adress bar and to make it simple we use "summary" for [feedType].  So a RSS feed for my IT-tips would be:
  http://www.blogger.com/feeds/2248583521093048479/posts/summary/-/it-tips



OK that's all. There are many more options for your RSS feeds such as how much text they should include, how many items etc. and if you want to dwell into this there is more to read right here:
http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/09/all-about-blog-feeds-part-1.html

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