While chatting with Grubby in Vegas he seemed unaware of how people were using Bloglines and other RSS feed readers. A few other folks seemed new to the subject as well so I thought I would rip out a quick post to serve as a mini-tutorial.
First off, let’s quickly talk about RSS feeds and what they are. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or so the myth goes). For the most part it’s just a different way of marking up your content with standardized XML tags that the RSS feed readers know how to read. The benefit of this more structured XML over plain HTML is that the markup identifies certain attributes of a post like the title, body, author, etc. so that information can be displayed in a more universal format. RSS comes in a few different flavors including something called ATOM but since most readers can read all the different flavors, for the purposes of this tutorial when I mention RSS it can apply to any of the various versions available.
Blah, blah, blah, so what does all this mumbo-jumbo mean? It means you can subscribe to all your favorite weblog RSS feeds and the feed reader will periodically go out and check those RSS feeds to see if any new content has been posted. In other words, instead of you needing to check 50 websites a day, it brings the newest content from those 50 sites to you.
I’m subscribed to over 300 RSS feeds on topics ranging from poker to politics. There’s no way I would surf 300 sites a day and it would be pretty frustrating if some of those sites updated infrequently. But because I subscribe to all of those RSS feeds, I just go to my feed reader and any new content from those 300 websites is there waiting for me.
This also has the benefit of allowing me to categorize the feeds so I can skip content that is of partial interest to me. A good example of this is my “Technology” grouping. That may have 50 or 100 new posts a day to news sites and weblogs that I’m interested in but only a small percentage of those stories are of any interest to me. I can quickly just scan the headlines, mark the ones I want to read and get rid of the rest.
I’ve thrown around the term feed reader a bit but I haven’t really described one so I’ll do that now. Basically, a feed reader is somewhat like a web browser or an email client. It’s either a piece of software you download that does the dirty work of grabbing the most current RSS feeds in the background or it can be an online service that does all of that for you.
My favorite reader is Bloglines. I like Bloglines because it’s web based. I can be anywhere in the world, on any computer, and read my RSS feeds. Other readers such as SharpReader (which is also an excellent program which I have used in the past) only keep track of what you’ve read on the machine you have the software installed on. For instance, if I read a bunch of posts on my home computer and then go to work and read them from my work computer, I would be reading the same posts twice since my work and home computers have no way of knowing what I’ve read on the other computer. Bloglines solves that because it’s accessed over the internet and as long as you’re logged in, it knows exactly what you’ve read previously regardless of what computer you access the site from.
So where do you find RSS feeds? Well, with Bloglines you can often just type in the name of the blog you want to track and it will figure out where the RSS feed is automatically. Sometimes you’ll have to feed it a specific file to check. Usually people have a link that says “Syndicate this site” or graphical tags like the ones I have in the navigation column to the right.
If you want to get a jump start you can check out the XML Feeds link in my header which links to a bunch of feeds that I wrote a program to collect from sites that didn’t have their own RSS feeds. You can also download this file and import it into your feed reader. If you want to search out feeds that may not be poker related, try News Is Free or Syndic8.
Finally, a bit of advice to the poker bloggers out there who have RSS feeds. Some readers don’t pick up on links to images unless you post the full URL for the image. For instance, if you normally put the image URL as something like /images/myimage.gif it will just show a broken link in some feed readers. You’ll need to use the full URL, like so: http://www.mysite.com/images/myimage.gif.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting post! I’m a developer and really like weblogs.asp.net - I’ve put up my own syndication of asp.net related blogs several times in several news aggregators (newsgator online, omea reader, u name it) but I always fall back to weblogs.asp.net. I guess the reason is that there are simply too many blogs on this topic, and I don’t have the time to keep track of all new blogs that pops up like mushrooms everywhere.
After some thinking I started working on a similar concept, but on Poker: http://www.cardspeak.net
I’d really like to hear your comments on this kind of site before I go “live” with it - maybe there are additional functionality, that could make it easier to use? Btw, the design is up for a redesign ;)
Kenneth,
Unfortunately, I think your site might run into some resistance. First, the domain CardSpeak.net is way too close to Hdouble’s Blogger blog The Cards Speak. Everyone knows HDouble’s blog so a site with a name so close is likely to be viewed as trying to rip him off.
Also, there’s been quite a few folks ripping off RSS feeds and posting them on their site to get high search engine ranking but the site is nothing more than a banner farm of affiliate deals. If your site has even the slightest hint of such you can expect the full wrath of the blogger community which would likely include legal action.
My best advice to you is to do whatever it takes to distance yourself from the above. I would pick a new domain name and I would go around and seek permission before posting anyone’s blogs. You don’t appear to be ripping people off as others have done in the past but you would surely win big karma points by seeking permission rather than people needing to contact you for removal.
I like the idea overall but I’m not sure how it’s much different than subscribing to all those feeds in Bloglines or another RSS reader. You should really consider some way to bring some additional value in your offering. I’m not sure what that is but if you’re doing the hard part of downloading and categorizing feeds then there’s probably more than a few value add features you could throw in there to make it a very useful tool for the community.
Best,
Bill
Been reading the site for a while and wondered about Rss but was too lazy to look. Good stuff, overall that is, thanks.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions Bill. I’m actually in the process of gathering e-mail addresses from each of the blogs I syndicate (however there are some blogs with no e-mail attached, not quite sure what to do with these yet). I was thinking about adding a link in the e-mail that would automatically remove a given blog, if the owner don’t want to be listed.
I’m also aware of the name “collision” with Hdouble’s Blogger blog, but not until recently - so I’ll try to squeeze out a new domain name from my not so creative brain (read: I’m open for suggestions :))
This site is by no means a ad-farm, I’m addicted to poker (…and programming) and would like to provide a tool to this community aka weblogs.asp.net. Cheers, and thanks again for your constructive feedback! - kenneth
How often does bloglines update the feeds?
On my site bloglines will only pick up my pictures if I use the short form and not the FQD form. Kind of annoying to think that doing it one way or the other breaks someone else.
FYI - just renamed the site to http://www.blogsonpoker.com
Kipper, I think they update every hour. I’ve heard some say it’s only once every two or three hours. It’s actually a pretty good deal for the blog owners too because it appears that Bloglines grabs 1 copy of the RSS feed instead of hitting the site hundreds of times a day. That might not sound like such a big deal but the more readers you get the more your RSS feed will get slammed by people checking hourly. Bloglines aggregates those requests which is nice.
I download online video using RipTiger. It?s powerful and easy to use. Once you start watching the video on the web, RipTiger will pick it up and do the recording for you.