Cormac’s blog

I’ve been learning about RSS over the last few weeks to keep track of various sites, and specifically the blogs of the students of the course I’m teaching. I’ve been using Google Reader, and enjoying playing around with it. However, there’s still lots that I find confusing.

Firstly, I’m not sure I’m using feeds correctly. One thing I don’t like about the usual feed:// urls is that they seem to obliterate the formatting of the original post, including stripping them of their images. So I’ve simply been putting the normal http:// url into Google Reader - which, so far, has worked ok.

However, some of the students are keeping their blogs by adding various pages, instead of posting everything sequentially in one place. This means that my reader doesn’t pick up these pages, or changes to them. I wonder if there is a way to track any changes within a domain…?

The other thing I need to keep track of is comments. After a bit of googling, I’ve been adding a separate subscription for each site, in the following format:

http://domain.com/?feed=comments-rss2

This seems to work ok - though it doesn’t seem to work for specific sections of sites (such as categories, etc.).

Finally, I’m trying to aggregate all this to make it easy for students to set up their own RSS systems. I’ve created a “bundle” in Google Reader, and I’ve exported an OPML file (after a fair bit of very odd Google Reader faff, I have to say). Now it remains to be seen whether the students will be able to use what I’ve done.

Any RSS-related help would be appreciated. What works for you?