Friday, January 13, 2006

I need help with tracking links and blogs

This is a general call for help from a newbie! I need help and advice about how to keep track of my blogroll and other bookmarked links.

Actually, Donny (ds) pm'ed me and asked if I use an RSS feed to keep track of my blogroll. I pm'ed him back saying I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. Since he didn't (hasn't) gotten back to me about it, I did some Googling and turned up all kinds of things. - - But, I'm still confused.

I figured out an RSS feed helps you keep track of news sources, blogs, websites, etc. Now I've got to figure out how it works.

All I want to do is find an easy way to follow blogs I'm interested in as well as a few news sources without having to click on each and every link to find new posts and articles. Nothing elaborate.

I've seen various blogs using Technorati, Bloglines and Blogrolling.

What is Technorati? Is it the similar to Bloglines or Blogrolling? What are the pros and cons? Are there other things out there that are better?


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

RSS means Really Simple Syndication. Most blogs and many newspapers have "rss feeds". You'll usually find them listed by that name or "atom feed" which, for your purposes, means the same thing.

But you need a special "reader" to have them come in at one place on your computer. My favorite is Omea, but that may look to confusing for a newbie. It's been a couple of years I've used Outlook, but if that is your email program and if memory serves, it includes an rss reader. If not, ask your friend to suggest a user-friendly reader. Most of them are free downloads.

Technorati is a service that lists blogs that have linked to you. (It's not very reliable.) You can also search for blogs by keyword at the site and you can set up topic keywords you are interested in to track those subject. I find Google Alerts words better.

Bloglines is an online free service for rss feeds. You enter the feed in your account there and the new posts drop in every day and you visit that site to read them.

Blogrolling is another service (a fee service, I believe) where you can list the blogs you want to appear in your sidebar and by entering just a little html code in your blog, it will always update itself when you add new blogs at the blogrolling site.

Hope that helps a little.

Anonymous said...

Thank-you, Ronni. It helps a lot.

Anonymous said...

I use blogarithm.com . You enter the blog urls you want to keep up with and they send an email every morning with the ones that have updated. It's very similar to Bloglines, only instead of downloading their program you get an email.

Anonymous said...

Diana, I set up an account at Blogarithm.com yesterday to try it out. Checked my email and ta-daa, new posts! Simple and easy to use.

I may also try Bloglines just to compare.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I learnt stuff here! :)

I prefer to check my feeds separately from my email - my inbox is cluttered enough as it is, and I don't always find it easy to come back to look at stuff I've skipped in my mailbox, as I'm a look-at-it, go, look-at-it, go kinda guy.

I'm just a simple guy armed with SharpReader.

Another alternative to Technorati is Google's own blogsearch.google.com, which allows you to search blogs. Pomegranate Tiger is listed already.

ds

Anonymous said...

I use Albion as a reader, it's free.

To set up your blog so it can be accessed by any reader check our your blogger help files.

to get albion http://www.abilon.org/

Thanks for stopping in and I hope this helps!