Readers' Comments Are Now Available as an RSS Newsfeed

Many newsletter readers use RSS newsreaders to quickly and easily retrieve the articles in this newsletter. Newsreaders are computer programs that automatically retrieve information from web sites that support the RSS standard and then store the information on a user's computer. Information available in RSS format includes this newsletter's articles as well as news, weather forecasts, stock market information, airline arrival times, UPS shipping information, and much more.

RSS provides a faster and easier method of having the latest information available from as many sites as the user wishes to monitor, including new articles published at this newsletter's web site at http://www.eogn.com.

For an explanation of RSS and of RSS newsreaders, see my earlier “What Can RSS Do For You?” article at: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2005/12/rss_explained.html.

A couple of weeks ago I added something new to www.eogn.com: RSS newsfeeds of the comments that others post to the various articles published here. I have been testing it and everything seems to work well. I think now is the time to announce the service.

This newsletter has long had an RSS newsfeed at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/atom.xml. If you use an RSS newsreader, you simply enter that web address into the newsreader and every new article is automatically retrieved when your computer requests it. According to the “hit counters” that I can see, more than one thousand people now read this newsletter's articles by the use of RSS newsreaders.

Each and every article published on this newsletter's web site now has its own RSS newsfeed, assuming that at least one comment has been posted.

For instance, open a web browser and go to the recent article "Turn Off Your Television!" that was posted on December 23 at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/12/turn-off-your-t.html. As I sit here writing these words, eleven comments have been posted at the end of that article. Until recently, the only method of reading those comments was to manually open a web browser and go to that address (http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/12/turn-off-your-t.html) to read the comments. If you wanted to check again a day later, you again had to open a web browser and return to the same address in hopes that something new might be there.

Now you can use your RSS newsreader to automatically retrieve any and all comments posted, now and in the future. The process is automatic, depending upon the capabilities of the newsreader you use. All you need to do is enter the address of the comments RSS newsfeed into your newsreader. In the case of the "Turn Off Your Television!" article, those comments are at: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/12/turn-off-your-t/comments/atom.xml.

By entering that address into your newsreader, you can have all new comments delivered to your computer automatically.

There are two methods of determining the address of the comments newsfeeds:

1. You can open the article in a web browser, scroll to the bottom of the article and then click on the link in "You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post."
2. If you already know the URL (address) of the original article, simply add "/comments/atom.xml" to the end of that address (without the quote marks.)

You can now read all the comments to articles of interest in less time and with fewer mouseclicks.

Please let me know if you encounter any difficulties in retrieving the RSS comments in your favorite RSS newsreader.

Comments

[Dae Powell]

RSS has organized my life. Thank you, Internet geniuses.

Happy Dae.
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com