I’ve often scratched my head and wondered why Craigslist didn’t have a blog.    I mean, everyone else had one, even the spotty kid down the street with his skateboard and Star Wars trading card collection.   But not Craigslist.   Even when the crap hit the fan over hookers advertising their wares on the site and a blog would have been the perfect platform with which to respond, did they go ahead and set a blog up?   Like hell they did.

But now someone seems to have told Craigslist that this is the 21st century and a blog has duly been set up.    But now here’s the kicker - they forgot to include a RSS feed!      What the hell is going on?   Is this amateur hour or something?   Couldn’t they have set the thing up on Blogger or Wordpress or something?

But don’t worry, ReadWriteWeb cobbled together a Feedburner feed so you can have the Craigslist posts sent to your RSS reader.   It isn’t perfect but it’s better than nothing.    Meanwhile, Craigslist, why don’t you fire your 10 year old blog designer and hire someone half-competent?

Technorati Tags: blog, craigslist, RSS

photo credit: Rappzula

While I was checking out a batch of new blogs the other day, I came across Feeddit which is a pumped up version of the Digg RSS feed - just the ticket if you’re a heavy hardcore Digger whose days are spent digging countless stories and you break out in a cold sweat if you miss the chance to bury the latest Microsoft story.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, feed, Feeddit, RSS

photo credit: Sr. Cosa de Daniel Henríquez

Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you’ve subscribed to (click on “View all items” to see all the posts).

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, Google Reader, RSS

Google Operating System has an excellent piece on a subject which has been baffling me for ages - getting your Gmail messages to show up in a RSS reader. I’ve never been able to get it to work but it actually turns out that it doesn’t work in Google Reader! In fact the only online reader that it works in is Netvibes! How’s that for weirdness?

Google doesn’t trust their own RSS reader to handle Gmail?

(more…)

Technorati Tags: email, Gmail, Google, netvibes, RSS

I am so overloaded with unread RSS feeds that sometimes I go through what I call “RFS” (RSS Fatigue Syndrome). It’s like a drug - you know you need to cut back but when you do, you feel like you’re missing out on something and you end up going back to it. Plus, my work writing this blog and also writing for Make Use Of and Google Tutor kind of requires me to read daily RSS feeds so that I have something to blog about.

So my curiosity was aroused when I read on Digital Inspiration (one of my favourite blogs) that there was now a “RSS Panic Button” which gave you the option to mark all feeds as read once your unread list hit a certain number (you can specify the number). I thought “ha! just the thing!” but when I investigated, I discovered that this wasn’t a standalone software application but instead a new integrated feature of Feed-Demon 2.6.

While I like the idea of a RSS panic button to wipe unread feeds, I am too married to my Google Reader to move to another RSS reader. So I hope someone at Google sees the RSS panic button idea and adopts it for use in Google Reader!

Technorati Tags: Feed Demon, Google Reader, panic button, RSS

One of the scenarios which will face a blogger eventually is getting dugg on Digg. This can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. It’s a blessing in that the number of site visitors will probably hit the roof and with a bit of luck, your RSS subscriber count will also go up. It’s also a curse because your site will most probably collapse due to the overwhelming surge in visitors. The classic catch-22.

But for a lot of dugg stories, it can take quite a while for the “Digg Effect” to kick in. In fact a lot of stories don’t get anymore than 10 diggs before fading into obscurity. So it’s quite often the case that you don’t realise you’re being dugg unless someone points it out to you.

So I have started to monitor certain domains on Digg using my RSS reader. Anytime a page on these domains get dugg, the page in question pops up in my Google Reader along with the link to Digg. This is good also for monitoring any comments that Diggers make.

For those of you who don’t know how to do this, just search for the domain in the Digg search box. You don’t need the “http://” part but you do need the rest. So for this domain, I would put betterthantherapy.net in the search box. Then filter it down to “URL only”. Once you’ve done that, click on the small orange RSS logo to the right of the page.

Congratulations, you’ve just subscribed to the feed. Now whenever a page on that domain gets dugg, you’ll find out immediately. This is also good if you are part of any informal Digg or Stumbleupon networks where you digg or stumble web content sent to you by friends. Just put the domains they mostly digg or stumble into your RSS reader and when they send you the link themselves, you can say to them “hah! too slow!”

Technorati Tags: Digg, RSS, Stumbleupon

I got a huge shock this morning when I came online and looked at the RSS count on the blog. It said 65. Yesterday it was 152 so you can imagine how shocked I was that I had lost 87 subscribers overnight. I was so disillusioned that I was ready to give up blogging and become a monk. (well, not really!).

Then I read John Chow’s blog and discovered the cause. He lost 5000 subscribers overnight and went hunting for the cause. It turns out that the missing subscribers use Google Reader. It seems that Google has turned off Feedfetcher which delivers the number of Google Reader users to blog RSS counts.

Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have my subscriber count back up to normal.

Fingers crossed.

Technorati Tags: feedfetcher, Google, Google Reader, John Chow, reader, RSS