There is an interesting exchange on Bob Doran’s nascent blog (Bob is a writer for the North Coast Journal who wrote a cover story on Humboldt County blogs). He writes about his lack of knowledge about vlogs (video blogs) having just learned such a thing existed. I guess he doesn’t have time to read other newspapers. If he did he might have come across my Tech Beat article in the Times-Standard last November: Blogs, vlogs and podcasts: Syndicated content made easy through RSS. Vlogs have been around for over a year already.
The main point of that article, though is the use of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) which allows someone to ‘subscribe’ to a web resource in order to be notified whenever that resource has been updated. The beauty of RSS is that you don’t have to keep visiting a web site to see if something new has been posted. Your RSS reader checks for you and keeps you informed. The RSS feed link to this blog can be found in the right column under the ‘Meta’ heading. What’s odd about all the Humboldt County blogs I have been visiting is that I can’t find the RSS link in any of them. It’s usually a text link, like mine, or a little orange button that says RSS or XML (exstensible markup language – RSS is a form of XML – I know, too geeky). I would subscribe to several of these blogs, including Bob’s but the feature is missing. Most of them are using Blogger, a very popular hosted system. I know they have this feature in their software. Maybe we need a Humboldt Blogger workshop.
Sorry, Bob. I guess I was a little stung by being excluded. At least I didn’t flame you on your own blog like the plazoid guy. AND I did post a helpful link on your blog to learning about more about doing vlogs which you said you would like to do. So peace?
Yo Bob, why you be dissing me so? You write: “[Bob] writes about his lack of knowledge about vlogs (video blogs) having just learned such a thing existed.”
Read the post again. I said I knew a “little bit about vlogging,” but did not know there were any locally. Truth is there was a lot more to say about local and non-local blogs and blogging than fit into the few pages we had to cover the topic in the Journal.
“I guess he doesn’t have time to read other newspapers.”
What is that supposed to mean? For better or worse I read the T-S pretty much every day, along with plenty of other papers. Tuesday’s Tech Beat sometimes eludes me because on Tuesday I’m busy finishing up a ton of work for the Journal.
“If he did he might have come across my Tech Beat article in the Times-Standard last November…”
What’s the real problem here? Are you stung by the fact that I overlooked or forgot about your story from months ago, which, I must point out, devotes exactly one short sentence to vlogs.
flame off, Bob the Humblogger (although not recently)
Thanks Bob, I put WordPress on my server a few months back but havent had time to play with it. Blogger made it all to easy. Guess I better go back and take a look at WP. Seems its what most of the geeks are using 🙂
The info about feed search I posted was wrong. Those were the results of a mobile search (cell phone)…I guess WAP pages? Thanks again for the help. CJ
Well, the software I use is called WordPress. I comes with the RSS feed link built in to most templates. You can see mine in the right column under the Meta heading. WordPress has both a version you download and install in your own account (that’s what I use) and a hosted version like Blogger.
Dang Bob, I missed your article also. I knew RSS was around but until I got my iPod last year had never used it much. Now I can’t live without it. Now that it really is getting “simple” to use I see it getting very popular.
Some of the blog type services (that I have tried)with RSS Don’t show up well in feed searches. Some that did seem to show up more were MSN Spaces, Libsyn, and the blog you get with MySpace of all things. I have been spending most of my time using Blogger for the time being. Do you have a favorite Blogging software that includes RSS? CJ
Ok, thanks. I read it. Now I’ll try a little of this.
Fred, I really encourage you to read my article which explains a lot of this and has links to Bloglines and one of the more popular news readers. Newsreaders are applications that automatically check sites to which you have subscribed using RSS. They are updated if there is new content.
Ok. Thanks. If the rain keeps me home today I’ll try and figure that out. Oh, how do you “add the url to the newsreader”? Not sure just what a newsreader is.
Isn’t this embarrassing? I don’t know squat and I’ve got people asking me for advice on how to set up a blog.
I signed up for a Blogger account. For an RSS feed link you need to go to Settings -> Site Feed. There you will find the URL of your RSS feed. Then you add the URL to your Links list.
When you click on a RSS feed link, you get a page with XML data. Ignore the page. Instead copy the URL in the address bar and add it to your newsreader (either web based like Bloglines, or a dedicated newsreader). See my article for more information.
Maybe we do need a workshop. Now that you mention it, my blog doesn’t have one of those RSS links. I just went through the settings for my blog and didn’t see anywhere to add the links. Oh well. Quite honestly, when I first learned of them I tried to use them on other blogs and couldn’t figure out how; just a bunch of html code I didn’t know what to do with.