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Posts Tagged ‘rss’
Collaboration with asynchronous communication – getting to know “you”
While gearing up for different conference trips and presentations, I’ve been trying to get to know collaborators using asynchronous communications, such as listening to Char James-Tanny’s podcast on techwritervoices.com. She presented “Virtual Ways of Communicating” at a Florida STC meeting and Tom Johnson recorded it and posted it later.
I really enjoyed not only listening to Char speak but also hear the audience questions and interactions. For example, when she showed tag clouds, one audience member asked, does the size and format of the tag words change when a tag is used more often than another? And I thought, wow, I’ve always assumed that is exactly how it works, but haven’t actually asked the question, such as refresh rate or what relative sizing means. It points out to me that I take a lot for granted in the Web 2.0 world due to observing so much of it so often. But, a new fresh perspective offers me the conceptual details that people would seek when first exposed to something like a tag cloud.
As part of listening to this podcast, I found many suggestions for cool videos, popular wikis, and new uses of RSS such as RSS that I hadn’t heard yet. I realize that no matter how hard I try to keep up, there are new applications of technology coming in every day. I thought I’d collect these together though as a nice collection of “have you seen this?” which may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast, but these were enjoyable to hear about and explore on my own.
- Video – lions rescue a buffalo baby
- Video – how to use a book (Updated to the one with English subtitles, thanks Char!)
- Wiki – Swarm sketch, watch animated historical views of sketches being created
- Wiki – Pirate master from a TV show
- RSS – Yahoo pipes, later learned about the Social Media firehose pipe from Char
- Search engine – Ms Dewey
- Map mashup – housingmaps.com mashup of craigslist and Google maps
DITA and wiki hybrids – they’re here
Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s DITA Central Texas User Group meeting, and both told tales of end-user doc written and sourced in DITA, with wikitext in mind as an output. About 20 people attended and we all enjoyed the show. I wanted to post my notes to follow up, and I’ll post a link to slide shows as well.
This post covers Lisa Dyer’s presentation on a wiki sourced with DITA topics. I’ll write another post to cover Alan’s presentation.
Although, actually, first, Bob Beims shared Meet Charlie, a description of Enterprise 2.0. Seems very appropriate for the discussions we’ve had at recent Central Texas DITA User Group meetings talking about wikis and RSS subscriptions and web-based documentation.
Lisa has made her presentation available online. My notes are below the slideshow.
[slideshare id=301959&doc=lombardi-wikis-model-1205252771520550-4&w=425]
DITA source to wiki output case study
Lisa Dyer walked us through her DITA to wiki project. Their high level vision and business goals merged with a wiki as one solution, and Lombardi has customers who had requested a wiki. Lombardi’s wiki is available to customers that have a support login, so I won’t link to it, but she was able to demo the system they’ve had in place since July 2007.
What wiki toolset – open source or entprise wiki engine?
On the question of choosing an open source or enterprise wiki engine, Lisa said to ask questions while evaluating, such as where do you want the intellectual property to develop? Will you pay for support? Who are your key resources internally, and do you need to supplement resources with external help? They found it faster to get up and running and supported with an enterprise engine and chose Confluence, but she also noted that you “vote” for updates and enhancements with dollars rather than, say, community influence. (Editorial note – I’m opining on whether you get updates to open source wiki engines through community influence. I’m certain you can pay for support and enhancements to open source efforts with dollars.)
Run a pilot wiki project
She recommends a pilot wiki, internal only at first, to ferret problems out while building in time to fix the problems. While Michele Guthrie from Cisco couldn’t present on the panel at the last minute, she also has found that internal-only wikis helped them understand the best practices for wiki documentation.
Meet customer needs – or decipher what they want and need
Lisa said that customers wanted immediate updates, knowledge of what’s new with the product and doc (800 pages worth), and wanted to tell others what they had learned. She found that all of these customer requests could be met with a wiki engine – RSS feeds, immediate updates, and the ability to share lessons learned. At her workplace, customers work extensively with the services people and document the implementation specifically, and that information could be scrubbed of customer-specific info. They found that rating and voting features give good content more exposure. Also, by putting the information into wikis, they found that there were fewer “I can’t find this information” complaints.
Intelligent wiki definition and separate audiences for each wiki
They have two wikis – one is for end-user documentation, one is for Services information. In the screens she showed us, Wiki was the tab label for the Services wiki, Documentation was the tab label for the doc wiki. The Documentation wiki does not allow anyone but the technical writers to edit content, but people can comment on the content and attach their own documents or images. The Services wiki allows for edits, comments, and attachments. The customers and services people wanted a way to share their unsanctioned knowledge such as samples, tips, and tricks, and the wiki lets them do that. The Services wiki has all the necessary disclaimers of a community-based wiki, such as “use this info at your own risk” type of disclaimers. Edited to add: The search feature lets users search both wikis, though.
Getting DITA to talk wiki
There are definite rules they’ve had to follow to get DITA to “talk wiki” and to ensure that Confluence knows what the intent is for the DITA content. For one, when they want to use different commands for UNIX and Windows steps in an installation or configuration task, they would use ditaval metadata around in the command line text (using the “platform” property) and use conditional processing for that topic. However, because of the Confluence engine’s limitation of one unique name for each wiki article, they had to create separate Spaces for each condition of the deliverable (UNIX Admin guide or Windows Admin guide, for example). This limit results in something like 12 Spaces, but considering it’s output for several books for separate platforms, 32 individual books in all, that number of Spaces didn’t seem daunting to me. She uses a set of properties files during the build process to tell Confluence what file set to use, and what ditavals they’re seeking, and then passes the properties to the ant build task. The additional wiki Spaces does mean that your URLs aren’t as simple as they could be – but in my estimation, they’re not completely awful either.
While I was researching this blog post further, Lisa also added these details about the Spaces and their individual SKU’s (Stock Keeping Unit, or individual deliverable). “Building on this baseline set of spaces, each new SKU would add 1 to 7 spaces hosting 3 to 21 deliverables, depending on the complexity of the ditaval rules and the product. Obviously, the long pole in this system is ditaval. A more ideal implementation would probably be to render the correct content based on user preferences (or some other mechanism to pass the user’s context to the engine for runtime rendition). Or, a ditaslice approach where you describe what you need, and the ditaslice is presented with the right content. Certainly innovation to be done there.”
Creating a wiki table of contents from a DITA map
She creates a static view of the TOC from the DITA map as the “home page” of the wiki. She currently uses the Sort ID assignment a DITA map XSLT transform to generate the TOC. She said they implemented a dynamic TOC based on the logical order of the ditamap by dynamically adding a piece of metadata to each topic – a sort id using a {set-sort-id} Confluence macro. The IDs are used to populate a page tree macro (the engine involved is Direct Web Remoting, or DWR… an Ajax technology). Currently, their dynamic TOC is broken due to a DWR engine conflict, which should be fixed in the next release. In the meantime, they are auto-generating a more static but fully hyperlinked TOC page on the home page of each Space. A functional solution, not great for back and forth navigation, but it shows the logical order which is pretty critical for a decent starting point.
DITA conref element becoming a transcluded wiki article
Another innovation she wanted to demonstrate was the use of DITA conrefs output as translusions in the Confluence wiki engine, so that in the wiki, the transcluded content can’t be edited inside of an article that transcludes the content. I don’t think it quite behaved the way she wanted it to, but knowing it’s a possibility is exciting. Edited to add: This innovation really does work, Lisa simply was looking at the wrong content (she admits, red-faced.) 
Burst the enthusiasm bubble, there are limitations and considerations
One limitation that I observed is that when you transform the DITA source to Confluence wikitext, there are macros embedded, so when someone clicks the edit tab in the wiki, they must edit in wikitext, not the rich-text editor, to make sure the macros are preserved. In the case of the Documentation wiki, they can instruct their writers to always use the wikitext editor. But, for the Services wiki, one attendee asked if users prefer the wikitext editor, and Lisa believes they do. Someone running MoinMoin at their office said they finally just disabled the rich text editor because they didn’t want to risk losing the “cool” things that they could do with wiki text. The problem at the heart of this issue is that if users really like the wikitext editor and do a lot of “fancy” wiki text markup (like macros), then another wiki user using the rich-text editor can break the macros by saving over in rich text. Edited to add: Lisa wrote me with these additional details which are very helpful – “actually, the macros are preserved when in Rich Text Editor (RTE) mode. the problem is that it looks ugly as heck – and if the user is not techie, potentially confusing. the RTE does add all kinds of espace characters to the content– in a seeming random way – and can negatively impact the formatting in general when viewing, but it doesn’t seem to affect our macros. However, if a user wants to use macros to spiffy up the content, then wiki markup mode is definitely recommended.”
If you’re interested in a copy of the case study, you can purchase it for $10 here:
Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords
I just used this “trick” to find out what job titles are relevant for some of the task analysis we’re doing while writing new materials. I think it helps you get into your user’s shoes and also realize the value that your software or hardware product brings to those who decide to become an expert user with it. Here is an example – plug in your keywords and see what you find out about your users.
- Go to Indeed.com, a job search aggregator site.
- Type in the name of the main product you’re documenting. In my case, it’s a software product called iMIS.
- Fill in a location that you think would have a lot of interest or activity around your software product. For my product, that location is Washington, DC.
Voila – look through the search results and pick out 5 keywords to use either as index entries, as role or persona names the next time you do task analysis, or sprinkle the terms liberally in the headings of your online documentation to aid in findability.
Example job titles from my scenario: database administrator, project leader, project coordinator, manager, accountant, administrative assistant, and a sprinkling of director.
If I were to subscribe to the RSS feed for this search, I’d call it yet another use for RSS feeds. For me, though, it’s a nice one-time check on the types of jobs people are trying to do with the software product I document.
Try it and let us know what you find, especially if any of it is surprising to you.
What does DITA have to do with wiki?
We tackled this question and then some at the January Central Texas DITA User Group meeting. I’m a little tardy in writing up my notes and thoughts about the presentation but it went really well and I appreciate all the attendee’s participation as well. We had a high school teacher in the audience and I applaud him for wanting to learn more about DITA to pass that knowledge on to high school students.
I brought along my XO laptop since I was talking about my work with wiki.laptop.org and Floss Manuals and found some more Austin-based XO fans, so that was a great side benefit to me as well.
One of Ben’s answers to the question “What does DITA have to do with wiki?” is “Maybe nothing.” Love it!
Ben introduced another the triangle of choices – you have likely heard of “cheap/good/fast, pick two.” How about “knowledge/reuse/structure, pick one.”
I have to do some thinking about that one and his perception of the limitations and tradeoffs offered by those choices or priorities. Reuse and structure are particularly difficult to pair but also give you the most payoff. Structure and knowledge are another likely pair, but it could be difficult to find subject matter experts who are also able to organize their writing in a very structured manner, and finding writers who know DITA really well and also have specific content knowledge may also be difficult to obtain. His workaround for the difficulty you’d face while trying to come up with a structured wiki is a sluice box – where raw, unstructured data is the top input, some sort of raw wiki is the next filter, and the final tightest filter of all is a topic-oriented wiki.
Original photo of a sluice box by t-dawg.
My take on the question is that there are three potential hybrid DITA wiki combinations, and Chris Almond at this presentation introduced the fourth that I have seen, using DITA as an intermediate storage device, interestingly.
The three DITA-wiki combination concepts I’ve seen are:
- Wikislices – using a DITA map to keep up with wiki “topic” (article) changes. Michael Priestly is working on this for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC.)
- DITA Storm – web-enabled DITA editor, but not very wiki-like. However, with just the addition of a History/Revision and Discussion tab, and an RSS feed, you could get some nice wiki features going with that product. Don Day had an interesting observation that sometimes when you add in too many wiki features on a web page you can hardly tell what’s content and where to edit it. I’d agree with that assessment.
- DITA to wikitext XSLT transform- but no round trip, have writers determine what content goes back to DITA source. Lisa Dyer will describe this content flow in the February session.
The slides are available on slideshare.net. Here are the slides that Ben Allums, Ragan Haggard, and I used.
[slideshare id=239223&doc=what-does-dita-have-to-do-with-wiki-1201150920945468-2&w=425]
Here are Chris Almond’s slides and his blog entry about the presentation. I described Chris’s project to Stewart Mader of wikipatterns.com and he blogged about our presentation as well at his blog ikiw.org.
[slideshare id=246329&doc=redbooks-wiki-central-texas-dita-ug-presentation-1201665419585231-4&w=425]
Community support – don’t think of yourself as a customer but as a member of a movement
I’ve signed up for the Give 1 Get 1 program for One Laptop Per Child, and just received the email today, November 12, 2007, with the link to the site, www.laptopgiving.org.
I read the terms and conditions with interest because I am seriously considering purchasing a laptop either for my son, who is four, or for his classroom of four-year-olds. Plus, I’ve been volunteering to help with their end-user documentation.
I’d love to buy one for every classroom at my son’s preschool but that’ll take some fundraising. I’ll boldly propose here that you can contact me if you’re interested in buying enough for a small preschool in Austin, Texas in addition to kids in least developed countries around the world.
I absolutely LOVE the spirit of the support statement. It reads as follows:
Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as “customers.”
I’ve been working on documentation for the XO laptop in the wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide and then taking the wiki content over to an Author-it instance. I’ll write more later about a wiki-based workflow, especially with translation in mind, and we are putting a process in place. Please, feel free to edit that page or contact me if you are interested in contributing.
Personally, the most difficult part so far has been my limited ability with design and layout. I have grand visions but feel my layout skills are inadequate for a kid- and parent-friendly look within Word. Nonetheless, it is an exciting time to be a small part of such an influential project.
I’m one of the friends, family, and bloggers who is willing to help with the XO laptop. So I urge you to go to www.laptopgiving.org and put your U$399 to good use.
Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, advocate for change
I’m listening in on Scott’s somewhat-famous Web 2.0 for technical communicators talk. He has given it 15 times this year already so I’m very excited to hear it here in Austin, TX at the Quadralay WebWorks RoundUp user conference. Here are my notes.
How can writers show they have highly transferable skills? What are the in demand skills?
information architecture, interaction design, modular content creation, localization and translation, document design, standards knowledge= document engineer (read Document Engineering by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath). How to add value to our careers – by creating human- and machine-readable documents, whatever form they may take.
seeqpod.com – playable search engine. Files that exist and are playable. Does it actually look for keywords within podcasts and let you play the relevant portions of that podcast?
songsza.com
jott.com – what would you like to “jott” – automatic voice recording from your cell phone that can be played back.
tapefailure.com – clips of your users using your website – combine and compare patterns
tagging
del.icio.us – showing his list of tagged bookmarks at del.icio.us/abelsp.
Offered a case study of using for call centers using del.icio.us – have your call center people automatically add tags to items that make sense to them, then the techpubs department can see all the tags, the frequency of the items, and the different vocabulary words used for their bookmarking.
mashups
periodic table of visualization methods
simile.mit.edu/exhibit/ – how you can filter content from a web browser. See the value of visualizing data in more visual ways for the average user.
syndication, subscription
pipes.yahoo.com – visual editor for RSS feeds, bringing them together and combining them.
hosted software (Software as a Service or SaaS)
docs.google.com Google Docs & Spreadsheets (side note – I’ll be publishing my wiki talk from STC Austin using Google Docs’ Presentation tool)
thinkfree.com
zoho.com – documents, spradsheets, projects, notebook, planner, wiki, others
blogs
documentation teams or developers putting end-user doc onto blogs
wikis
interactive voice response company using wiki
parking meter company using wiki
Virgil Griffith created a wiki scanner – salacious edit site – looks for IP addresses and associates them with the company name.
DITA Storm – edit DITA pages on the web.
guided authoring – can developers write role-based documentation if they are guided to do so, with examples and guided templates so they know where content goes.
podcasts
video documentation
viddler.com – allows you to upload videos and annotate them.
See also video jug, expert village, sclipo, 5min, viewdo, teacher tube, youtube howto
social networks
linkedin.com – LinkedIn for Groups – STC and CM Pros will offer a member directory
Get his slides from slideshare.net.
Feedburner support – they help until it sticks
I want to extol the virtues of Jon Klem at Feedburner, plus give a status update for this feed and the old TalkBMC feed. Now the feeds have been combined into one, bringing subscribers over with no interruption, and Jon stuck with me for no less than a 16-email message thread so that he and I understood what was going on behind the scenes for this feed.
My goal was to have a seamless transition to my new blog, and thanks to Ynema Mangum, the talented and clever powerhouse behind talk.bmc.com and Tom Parish, the SEO brains and guru for the site, I was able to bring over the subscribers from my old feed to my new feed. So with their permission I emailed Feedburner support to explain my situation and see what the technology could do.
Feedburner has a way to transfer one feed from one account to another, and then transfer the subscribers from one feed to another. Then, the account holder (that’s me) exports the stats from the old feed to a spreadsheet for safekeeping, and then deletes the old feed and stats.
Are you as curious as I was about the most popular posts from my talk.bmc.com blog? I’m sure you’re not, but here are the top three anyway. Your analysis and interpretation is as good as mine.
- Celebrating moms and parenthood in the workplace — TalkBMC
- Connecting the dots, or pixels, for service impact — TalkBMC
- Best practices in tech comm for customer feedback — TalkBMC
Interview about wikis for tech doc with Dee Elling of CodeGear
While researching my STC Intercom article about wikis and technical documentation to be published in a few months, I interviewed Dee Elling via phone and email because she left a helpful comment on my talk.bmc.com blog entry about a DITA and wiki combo. Dee’s the manager of the documentation group at CodeGear and she blogs at http://blogs.codegear.com/deeelling/.
Anne -What are some of the factors for selecting a wiki software package?
Dee -I’ve encountered hesitation from some writers about using a markup interface. Many writers preferred a Word-like GUI interface, such as Confluence provides. Another consideration is cost, since there is not always a budget for new systems; at CodeGear we use MediaWiki. Primarily we manage internal information such as schedules and doc plans; lately we are collaborating with engineers to write FAQs and release notes.
At my previous employer, one engineering team was writing the documentation themselves on the wiki (using outlines provided by the writer), and the writer cleaned it up and converted it to PDF for distribution with the product. That is a great use case which I believe could seed the adoption of wikis into the documentation process, especially in companies where there are limited doc resources.
At CodeGear I can post copyrighted material to our Developer Network. The Developer Network technology allows comments on postings, which is not the same as wiki but a good start. Since joining, I have started to post traditional doc content as “articles” there. I’ve already fixed a few doc issues due to rapid customer feedback! We are also working on a design to make the website interface more wiki-like.
Anne -How do you get legal approval for such an open-edit site?
Dee -At my previous company I never got to the stage of implementing a public wiki. However I had many discussions about the legal aspects elated to the product documentation. The legal aspects seem complex, but lawyers can write new terms for new situations.
At CodeGear the issue will involve intellectual property, but the user base is so active on the internet that there are few “secrets”. More important will be the issue of releasing information too soon or otherwise getting in trouble with SOX compliance. (That makes my head spin!)
Anne -What are the considerations when choosing where the wiki is hosted?
Dee -Cost and reliability are factors, but most important is buy-in from the IT department, who would likely manage the hosting.
Anne -Which types of products are best targeted for a wiki?
Dee -Complex software products are a good example. There is so much flexibility in software and product documentation cannot cover every use case. The wiki lets customers add content that is relevant to their own use cases, and that will benefit others.
Anne -How can you encourage your users to contribute?
Dee -Keeping up a dialog with the customers is helpful. If you respond to them, a dialog develops, and they are more likely to contribute again.
Anne -What are some of the success factors for the wikis that contain
technical documentation?
Dee -Does it result in more positive feedback from customers? Do customers help each other and contribute to strengthening the installed base? Does it increase product visibility and mindshare in the market? Is it perceived as a strategic advantage over competitors? Does it cut down on tech support phone calls?
Anne -What traps should be avoided?
Dee -The trap of not responding or not paying attention. Writers must diligently track the “living documents” they have created, and they must truly collaborate. If customers contribute and their contributions go unrecognized, they may think that the company is not fully supporting them.
Public wiki documentation must be actively managed and that takes more writer effort than in the past, when documents were forgotten as soon as they went to manufacturing. Contrary to the fear that with wikis you don’t need writers anymore, I believe that with wikis the role of the writer will grow.
Thanks so much for your help, Dee, and for sharing your experience with all of us who are interested in the best ways to harness the power of wikis for end-user doc.
RSS Roundup
RSS must be hitting the big time since Microsoft will support RSS reading in the new version of Internet Explorer, IE7. Charlie Wood (he’s an enterprise RSS expert here in Austin) has already noticed that IE7 won’t be supporting password-protected feeds, however. I don’t yet have any feeds that I read that require a password, though, but I have been enjoying Charlie’s vision on RSS for a while. Fred already thought about secure RSS notifications for banking and so on, but check out Charlie’s ideas for use cases for enterprise RSS.
- Customer Support Use Case
- Marketing Use Case
- Field Sales Use Case (which he has made come to life with his Spanning Salesforce application)
Charlie’s blog often contains insightful and forward thinking for a technology that is gaining attention and adoption rates are increasing. Heck, Scoble reads him, but I found Charlie through an Austin-based RSS aggregate list that used some sort of geography marker to collect a list of Austin Bloggers.
I’m also planning to read more on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.
I have some notes from the “RSS: not just for blogs anymore”, SXSWi talk, with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines. Each panelist had interesting ideas for what RSS is being used for besides reading blogs.
They estimate that there are 75 million RSS users in the US and UK, but only about 17-32% of the users know they’re using RSS (source: marketingsherpa.com). Adina Levin, the moderator, noted that some users use RSS notification to avoid the flood of emails as a source of information. What’s interesting about that observation from my personal experience is that I find when I introduce RSS feeds to some folks, they would prefer to get the RSS content in their email client (via Newsgator). Some people just prefer a one-stop-shop for information and that happens to be Outlook for them. They want to “open the fire hose.”
RSS is mostly associated with text content, and as Scott Johnson put it, RSS was originally just headlines and links, but has now become “XML that matters to his Mom.” But Feedburner is starting to see more “big enclosures” on RSS for TiVo-like web content. I have often explained RSS aggregators as “TiVo for web pages” so that analogy makes so much sense. Preach it, Chris.
Robyn Dupree of Bloglines had the most comprehensive list of alternatives to text for RSS. Considering that Bloglines has 1.5 B articles in their index (and they only index ones that people actually subscribe to through Bloglines), they likely see the most creative and varied uses of RSS. Here’s her list (furiously scribbled in my notebook):
- Podcasts, video
- “Buzz” on blogosphere with Most Popular Links feature that you can subscribe to
- Notifications on classified ads (craigslist has this, I believe)
- Group conversations (such as Yahoo Groups, which offers RSS feeds for conversations)
- Package tracking (nifty! especially for ebay resellers she says this is a useful tool)
- Product newsletters (again, email alternative)
- Calendars (notification for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
- Higher education (notification for course information)
- Searches for competitive intelligence and other specialized information
After the panelists spoke, they opened up the floor to audience members who had ideas for RSS beyond blogging. Adina tagged all of them using the del.icio.us tag rssbeyondblogs. One of the most interesting ones to me is stuffopolis, helping you keep track of your stuff (and helping small businesses share stuff online, apparently.) Another creative stretch for RSS feeds is actually a couple of WordPress plug-in created by Andy Skelton and showcased on andy.wordpress.com including his 30 boxes calendar and his dodgeball info (although that one is apparently broken and named “Unknown Feed” on the sidebar right now). I sat behind a guy who works at dodgeball (recently acquired by Google) and he was very excited to be mentioned.
Any other ideas for RSS beyond blogging? I think I’ve got to go find some secure feeds to subscribe to just to make sure I’m on the cutting edge of RSS technology.
How to subscribe to a blog
Using my own blog as an example, natch, I’ve written instructions on how to subscribe to blog feeds
What do I do with that RSS button? Well, you need the “Tivo for web pages,” which is an RSS reader or aggregator. RSS aggregators are tools that manage your feed subscriptions for you so that you can be notified about new content and read it when you want it. This page contains descriptions of the most popular ones. http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
For a Windows-based environment, I suggest SharpReader, which is a separate, standalone application, or Bloglines, which is a web-based application that you access in a web browser.
Here are some sample procedures for adding a feed to my blog on talk.bmc.com, Exploring Routes to Value. The first involves clicking on the RSS button to go to the feedburner page where you can click on the aggregator of your choice. The next two procedures use SharpReader and Bloglines as examples.
Adding a subscription
- Click the yellow RSS button
located in the right-hand column above. - On the Feedburner page that you go to, select the RSS reader of your choice, and click the button to subscribe to the feed using that RSS reader.
Adding a subscription using SharpReader
- Go get the link for the RSS feed by going to http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-gentle/anne-gentle/ and right-click the small RSS button and choose Copy Shortcut.
- Launch SharpReader.
- Paste the RSS feed URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/TalkBMC-AnneGentle) into the Address field and then click the Subscribe button. Click for a screen shot.
Adding a subscription using Bloglines
- Go to http://www.bloglines.com.
- Register for a login.
- Get the link for the blog’s RSS feed by going to http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-gentle/anne-gentle/ and right-click the small RSS button and choose Copy Shortcut. You can do a similar procedure for any blog that you read by finding their RSS feed URL.
- Once you log in, click the Add link under the My Feeds tab. Click for a screen shot.
- Paste the RSS feed URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/TalkBMC-AnneGentle ) and click Subscribe.
- On the screen that follows, you can organize your feeds by using folders for categories. Click Subscribe and the feed will appear in the left-hand column. Click for a screen shot.Edited to add: For even more information about the feeds that talk.bmc.com provides, click on over to http://talk.bmc.com/talkbmcrss/ for a nice succinct page which discusses the intricacies of all our feeds here at talk.bmc.com.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
