iWeb RSS

Your iWeb blog has an RSS feed built right in. But you can make it easier for your readers to subscribe to it. This screencast shows how to provide links that add your feed to My Yahoo and Google homepage.

We’ll also look at making sure the RSS feed works when you publish to a folder instead of .Mac. If you’ve found the iWeb URL field confusing, we’ll clear things up. If you don’t enter the right URL in the field your iWeb RSS feed won’t work.

When you’re done watching, click Murphy’s Yahoo / Google links on his start page. You wouldn’t want to miss a post!

NOTE: If you’re here because the RSS feed on your iWeb blog doesn’t work, make sure you watch the second half of this screencast.

Google Reader

When your feeds pile up you might need to look beyond Safari and Firefox. There are standalone applications designed just for handling feeds. Want to try one without trying too hard? Look no further than your Google account. The Google Reader is still in beta, but it’s got some slick features.

This screencast runs through the basic features. The interface is a little offbeat, but so is Gmail - right? If you try out the reader, add Murphy Mac to your subscribed feeds. Many sites have links to add them to Google or My Yahoo.
We’re almost done with RSS week. Based on the mail Murphy’s gotten it was a huge success. We’ll be back to business as usual next week.

Reminder: Google Reader is still in the lab. Your results may vary.

Bom Dia

All your RSS Feeds on One Safari Tab

Are there a bunch of sites you go to every morning? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have Safari load them all up instead of you clicking each address?

Sure, you already know you can click Open in Tabs from a bookmark folder, but did you know you can eliminate a click in the process? Murphy can show you in this screencast.

The screencast also covers how to add multiple RSS feeds into one tab, combining them into one big reading list.

RSS in Firefox

Among Murphy Mac readers, Safari is beating Firefox 36 to 32 percent. Believe it or not, 18 percent of the readers are using Windows. But only 5 percent are using IE. What do you think - work machines locked down so Firefox can’t be installed??

Regardless, it seems well worth taking a look at how Firefox handles RSS feeds. If you weren’t watching yesterday, we covered RSS for Safari. The two browsers take different approaches. Firefox leads you toward toolbar based feeds while Safari gets straight to showing you the feed’s content.

RSS week continues tomorrow, so check back for Murphy’s method for adding multiple feeds to one Safari tab.

RSS in Safari

We’re going to be looking at RSS all week, starting with a hint from macosxhints.com. This snippet will focus on Safari, but we’ll be looking at other tools to exploit the power of RSS as the week goes on.

RSS stands for Really Simple Sydication. Sites that update their content frequently provide RSS feeds so their visitors can find fresh content easily.

You’ve probably seen orange buttons like the one above or others that say RSS or XML. Those buttons indicate there’s a feed for the site you’re viewing. Trying to read feeds with Internet Explorer 6 probably didn’t get you very far. Microsoft was a late-comer to the party, and looks to be aggressively trying to catch up. Sound familiar?

Watch the screencast if you’ve never subscribed to a feed. Or even if you have. And check back all week - Murphy will have more information on RSS for you.