rss

Let’s face it! Google Reader was a pretty slick interface before they went and made any changes this week. I wasn’t expecting it (probably was mentioned on the reader blog RSS feed) but it is a welcome update.

I am a huge fan of clean looking interfaces. I supposed that is why I like OS X and some of the simpler applications out there. They have taken away some of the colouring that they had on the left side and replaced it with white backgrounds. The sections are separated with lines rather than a background colour difference which looks much nicer. My biggest pet peeve of the old version was the green background under the ‘add subscription’ button and now it’s gone.

Before:

After:

I have been using Google Reader for quite some time as my RSS reader. It’s a great way to read RSS feeds and I like the fact I can log in from anywhere with internets access to take a peak if I have time. It’s nice to know that Google is keeping an eye on their existing products and trying to find ways at making them better.

Some of the other cool features include the ability to collapse sections on the left side, the ability to turn off unread counts, updated friend sharing tools and they have added more bundles to their list.

I must say that I am happy with the graphical update and look forward to making use of the new features. If you don’t use Google Reader and are looking for a good web based RSS reader, give it a chance. You won’t be disappointed.

I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in Wordpress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted Wordpress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!

I was able to add the option to digg my articles to the blog. Each post on the main page has the button as well as each post if accessed individually.

This post is more a test for me. I am curious what happens to the code when it is pushed through RSS. If it comes through that would be amazing.

Feel free to digg away!

I have had RSS setup for sometime with the default WordPress settings. It worked great except that there are little options. People have been subscribed but I have no way of telling how many. Either I wasn’t looking in the right places or the feature built in just doesn’t carry the information. So many people read blogs by subscribing to their feeds, never to return to the original site. Heck, I do it too.

So I have turned to Feedburner. Another RSS feeder that allows the publisher to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and also has a great interface for the subscriber.

If you subscribed before now to my RSS feed, I would ask that you cancel and re-subscribe with Feedburner if it’s not too much trouble. If the only option is cancel the old and not re-subscribe I would prefer you keep reading, however I would love to track who’s out there.

Simply click over on one of these icons on the right!

If your service isn’t listed there, click on either the orange RSS icon or the feed counter.

To enable the features on the right site I installed a Feedburner widget that I like the look of. There are a couple out there but some of them have integration problems with my theme so I chose this one.

Then I added the counter which you can get from the Feedburner website. They have a code generator that I took and added into a “text” widget in Wordpress. And voila, I think a nice addition!