200 OK

Just a quick post really about news feeds, do you use them? do you even know what they are? lets assume you don’t and you are wondering what the point in them is.

Basically a news feed (commonly referred to as RSS)  is a means by which a website or blog can let you know about new content it has published without you having to visit said site or blog every so often to check up on it. This feed takes the form of a normal internet address that you can put into a news reader and from there on you can keep track on what is going on in all your favorite websites.

There are many different readers you can use to do this, I recommend Google Reader as its very simple to use and if you use gmail (if not you should!)  its easy to get to when checking email.

Here is an example of what it looks like once you have it setup and have added in some feeds:

So you can see I have loads of folders setup with feeds from all my favourite websites. Every time I log in I can immediately see what about 30 websites and blogs are up too. All you need to do is copy the link to a website’s feed and add it as a subscription in Google reader and ya on your way. I know a load of folks out there that’d benefit from this, it takes a few minutes it set up and really improves how you use the interwebs.

YouTube tip:

If you want to add in a feed of a specific channel from YouTube you can do it! Just copy the channel address and Google Reader will do the rest, e.g. ‘http://www.youtube.com/user/BBC‘

I’m back on the blog! with a new theme! for some reason we cannot figure out the last one died, i think it had something to do with it being apple styled and therefore it reached its shelf life! anyway i digress.

Today on facebook one of my chums on there wanted to know how to link his blog posts into facebook automatically. This is something i’v been wanting to do for a while and after a bit of searching the interwebs i found out how.

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how do do this but most of them focus on the old style layout of facebook not the new one. So without further adieu heres how you do it.

Find your feed

Every blogging site/software worth their salt has a mechanism to feed out posts in a format online readers can use to access the latest blog posts as they are published. The first thing you need to do is find out the link for yours, here are where Blogger and WordPress feeds are located:

Blogger:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

WordPress:
http://blogname.wordpress.com/feed/  (or just http://your-blog-url/feed/ if you have WordPress on a webserver)

Once you have this link highlight and copy it.

Add your blog to facebook

Now you have your feed link all you need to do is login to facebook and in the top left hand corner of the screen go to settings -> Applications.

This will load a list of applications, one of which is called notes, click on the word notes.

This will load another screen with a link on the left that says Edit import settings, click on that.

This will load a further page with a text box, copy your blog feed code into that box and tick the agreement button that it wont be feeding horse porn and terrorist bomb making tips and after a bit of a wait it will now be setup!

Now whenever you add in a new blog item it will automatically show up in facebook. Think of all that time you’ll save pasting it in your status update as a link, at least 15 minutes a year