Sunday, August 1, 2010

Following instructions does not always work..

I have just created my bloglines account and have attempted to add the 5 feeds to it by following the instructions given in the CommonCraft "RSS in plain english" youtube video.

Was it as easy as following the instructions step-by-step?

NO! Whenever I clicked on the RSS icon (which so many sites did not even have) there was no mention of saving it in bloglines or any other feed reader via the one click access method. There was also no page with code on it as mentioned.

I kept getting a window with the following message:

"You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content. When you subscribe to a feed, it is added to the Common Feed List. Updated information from the feed is automatically downloaded to your computer and can be viewed in Internet Explorer and other programs". Learn more about feeds. Subscribe to this feed

In one way this was great, as I could simply see it by clicking on my favourites tab and then selecting the feeds tab and clicking on the feed which I wanted to look at, but was also frustrating in that I was not able to actually use the feed reader of choice to save to.

At this point, I decided to look at the Top 1000 list in bloglines and thought I could easily just select from here. However, clicking on the RSS icon resulted in the same result as previously achieved. Alternatively, clicking on the Bloglines icon kept resulting in an "internal server error" message.

So, I went back to watch the video again and this time when I got the "You are viewing a feed ..." message I copied the URL that appeared for this page, went to bloglines and found the add button in my feeds tab and pasted it to the "blog or URL feed" search field which produced a list of feeds which i was then able to successfully subscribe to!

Note: Although following the exact steps as shown in the video, was not always that successful it did help to give me some guidence in order to play around and find my way to success.

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