Lilahpops

Stay up-to-date with your favourite websites by subscribing to them

Back in March I wrote a post on how to add your Flickr photos to your blog feed. During April, I participated in the April Challenge - Entropy at photochallenge.org. The challenge was to take a photo a day for the entire month of April and upload each one to Flickr. I don’t write daily posts here at Lilahpops but for that month my blog feed had new content every single day.

The addition of my Flickr photos has become incredibly useful in providing fresh content more frequently to my RSS subscribers.

But you don’t have a blog?

So, you don’t have your own blog but you read tons of blogs and news sites and other stuff, right? Do you bookmark each site and visit them individually? There’s an easier, faster way and it’s called RSS!

RSS allows you to keep track of your favourite websites at once. You don’t need to visit each site for the latest news, the updates come to you.

How you can subscribe

Check out the video below and see how you can simplify and optimise your web surfing time. And if you are interested in learning about photography make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed.

The video suggests three places where you can subscribe to your faves:

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Newsgator

I actually use iGoogle. I love it. Read below (after the video) to see how I use RSS.

How I subscribe to my faves

If you have an Google account and haven’t yet tried it you’ll see the iGoogle option next to your login name. I have six tabs arranged by subject. This is the break down:

• one for various news websites I read (local and international)
• one for web design/development
• one for photography
• one for my Gmail and Google calender
• one for blog writing tips; and
• one for miscellaneous sites I visit.

The benefit is that if you see a headline that catches your eye you can read it right then and there or visit the site for more. If you have regular websites that you visit this is a simple, smart way to surf the web.

For more information about RSS check out:

• RSS Day

Tart up your blog’s feed with some Flickr photos

Do you use Feedburner for your blog’s RSS feeds? I set up a Feedburner account when I first started Lilahpops but I hadn’t spent much time learning the ins-and-outs of it. A couple of days ago I decided to check my subscriber count and have a bit of a look around. I found this neat optimisation solution which lets you splice your Flickr photostream into your blog feed.

See the screenshot of my feed below. It’s quite easy to see which ones are my website posts and what is streaming from Flickr. As the focus of my website is photography I thought this was quite a neat trick:

Wanna try it?

This is a very simple process:

• 1. Login to your Feedburner account and select your feed link under Feed Title
• 2. Select the Optimize tab

Look down the left-hand column at the items under Services. There is a tick next to each service you have applied to your feed. In my feed you’ll see I have BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed and Photo Splicer working so far:

• 3. Select the Photo Splicer option
• 4. Choose Flickr from the Photo Service (Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots are available)
• 5. Type in your Flickr ID … don’t know it? Pop over to BigHugeLabs and do a quick search on your username
• 6. Choose how many photos you want included in your feed (mine is currently set to 5)
• 7. Click Activate

which will change to:

• 8. Click Save and your done. You can de-activate your selection at any time.

These are the settings I used:

The update to my feed didn’t change immediately but it didn’t take very long either. Now you have a nice visual treat for your subscribers!

I have to thank Iain from The West Ring for asking me how I got my Flickr photos into my blog feed and giving me the idea for this post.

Have you got any other Feedburner tips? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts

• What my blog statistics reveal about you
• My Flickr collection is now organised
• Flickr is the key to my social photography experience