Friday, May 20, 2011

Something new: Subscribing to labels

It took me a lot longer to figure out how to do all this than I thought it would, but I have now not only created my very first Blogger Page, I have also set up links that can be used to subscribe to RSS feeds for posts that have been assigned particular labels. You can find all of this near the top of my blog, under the tab "Subscribe To My Blog."

I had to learn several new things to get everything to work. For those of you who might be interested, here are the sources of all the information I used that resulted in my new page:
  • Offer RSS feeds for Blogger search labels - This page showed me how to format URLs for RSS feeds for particular labels. As far as I can tell, Blogger does not currently have a quick and easy way to allow people to subscribe to feeds for particular labels - you can click a label, and all posts with that label come up, but when you click on the "Subscribe to this page" button on your browser, it defaults to subscribing to the entire blog (if I'm wrong about any of this and have managed to make this more difficult than it needed to be, then please let me know). I did not follow the step involving FeedBurner. I was tempted, but I'd like to read up on it some more first.
  • Reuse Blogger pictures in future posts - This blog post showed me how to get the URL I needed in order to incorporate the RSS feed image into my blog's CSS, for reuse as a bullet in a list.
  • Code snippets for displaying a list of feeds - This is where I got the code that let me create a list of feeds, with the feed icon as a bullet point.
I think that's it. Like I said, if I made this all harder on myself than I needed to, please let me know. While this made for a fun puzzle-solving session, if Blogger has an easier way to set up feeds for individual labels I'd love to know.

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