Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Feed Readers and mukto-mona


What are feed readers?
Feed readers or newsreaders are software that enable us to read feeds/news from different sources (websites) or newsgroups.

Every blog site has a feed. A blog is like a news-server. Everyday there can be new posts and comment updates.

If you use a reader and add your friends/favorite bloggers’ blogs you will receive updates in your reader as soon as any of them make a new post. The idea is fascinating. It’s like a newspaper aggregated with posts from your friends’ and others blogs.

If you are new to feeds or if you don’t have a feedreader software installed in your PC you can try Google Reader. It’s an online feed reader offered by Google. It is being more and more popular each day. Google reader is available at this address:

          http://www.google.com/reader/


Or you can download a popular feedreader here:
          http://www.feedreader.com/download

In Google Reader you will find an option at top left corner named “Add Subscription”. Clicking it you will enter feed urls. In software there will be same type of option may be called “Add Feed” or “New Feed”.

Now you need to know the feed urls for blogs and other sites.

How to add site feeds on reader?
For blogger.com which is google’s blog service; the blogspot URL itself serves as feed url. For example my tech blog http://sa-os.blogspot.com has the same feed URL http://sa-os.blogspot.com. Hence all blogspot style blog urls will have their feed url similar to their blog URL. For example, http://www.atheistmedia.com have the same URL.

All somewherein blog has following feed url:

          http://www.somewhereinblog.net/blog/BloggersName/rss

Of course you need not remember these patterns. Go to somewherein blog. Click on a post. You will see on right side under blogger’s name rss feed URL is linked.

Many websites maintains their feeds on the same URL. If feed url is not found on the website try the domain of the website.

Nagorik blog has the following feed url pattern:
          http://www.nagorikblog.com/blog/blogID/feed


Mukto-mona feed URLS
Mukto-mona does not display rss feed links on pages still now. But as it is based on wordpress we have feed urls for mukto-mona too.

mukto-mona has two kinds of blogs
      English Blog (feed url = http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress)
      Bangla Blog (feed url = http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog)

But tweak is necessary for individual author feeds. We need to concatenate &feed=rss2 with author url to get feed url.

English Blog Feed URL:
          http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?author=AuthorID8&feed=rss2

For example, author Abul Kasem’s blog’s feed url will be:
          http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?author=4&feed=rss2


Bangla Blog Feed URL:
          http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?author=AuthorID8&feed=rss2

Avijit Roy’s page is resided here:
          http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?author=5

Feed url for his posts will be:
          http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?author=5&feed=rss2

No comments:

Post a Comment