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Monday, June 04, 2007

bookmark versus feed subscription

There are few ways to mark a website. The most common method is to bookmark/favourite in the browser. The shortcut for that is Ctrl + D :). As we surf more and more websites, we are likely to bookmark a lot of websites and the list of bookmark in the browser is getting longer; but you can always create folders to manage your long bookmark list.

New method of marking a website is to subscribe to RSS/Atom feed of your favourite websites. The advantage of this method is that you will know when the website is updated. Firefox offers feed subscription via Live Bookmark. Other browsers offer similar feature too. This is a good feature. One of the disadvantages of using this method is that you cannot access the feed whenever you are away from your computer.

Now, let me introduce web-based feed aggregator/reader. This aggregator/reader collects all your feeds and display these feed at their website, online or offline. Now, you can always access your feeds anywhere as long as you have internet connection.

I have been using Google Reader as my feed reader. Now, I have reduced my bookmark list and subscribe all the feeds of my favourite websites. The only trouble for this is when the website does not offer any RSS/Atom feeds :(.

For every blog hosted at blogspot.com, you can always find their post and comment feed respectively. Although the blog author may not display their feed, you can always find the feed.

To find post feed, you can always click the feed icon at the address bar. In firefox, the RSS icon is the one in orange ;). Manually, you can type this address
http://theblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
For comment feed, the address is
http://theblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
By subscribing the blog's comment feeds, I will know when new comment has been posted :). Now, I am waiting for Utusan Malaysia to offer RSS feeds :-w

I did not mention social bookmarking in this post. If you are interested, perhaps you can visit Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit. Social bookmarking is useful in finding excellent websites around the world B-)

Related post:
Google Reader shared items hack
Change default blog post feed to feedburner

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

My only problem with google reader is that I rarely check it.

I guess I depend on efx2's subscription system so much that even my blog circle is limited to those on efx2 and those that i link on my blog.

Hafiz said...

if most of your blog circle is on efx2, that should be alright. some of my feeds that i tracked on google reader is for news and web design :).

hayad said...

erm..dah lama gak dok try memahamkan diri psl feed2 ni..tp still cam blur2..hehe

Anonymous said...

same here with the efx2 subscription. with the exception of the current blogging dry spell brought about by cuti sekolah, those are enough keep my online time close to the limit :D

Hafiz said...

hayad: dah jawab dlm email :).

moshimoshi: kena tunggu cuti sekolah habislah kalau macam tu. efx2 kalau dibiar beberapa hari, blog alert and tracking alert boleh mencecah dua digit. Nasib baiklah hanya menjenguk 3-4 efx2 blog sahaja :). kalau tak, my online time will increase exponentially ;)

shironeko said...

Salam,

bro, utk feeds tu tertinggal .com :)

info tambahan:
selain 2 feeds ni, kita boleh jugak subscribe kat 'post under label' address cam ni;

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABELNAME

Hafiz said...

thanks for that...tak perasan ada tertinggal.

thanks for that info on feeds label :)

Blogspot feed ni based on updated date, so, kalo ada update post lama, post ni will be the latest feed. so, kalau ingin feed ni based on published date not on updated date, used this one :D

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=published