A new feature in Google Reader now allows you to monitor (and get updates) from static websites that do not offer feeds.
Using this feature is as easy as subscribing to a normal RSS feed – simply enter the URL of the site in the Add Subscription box and hit enter. For a feed-less site, Google Reader will automatically show you a dialog box with an option to Create a Feed.
GReader will setup a monitoring service for the page and intimate you of any changes when they occur.
Earlier on, the only options for monitoring a site for changes were third-party services like Page2RSS, Feed43 etc. – which acted as an intermediary layer between your feed reader and the site and provided you with RSS feeds from the target site’s content. To view the feeds, you were required to subscribe to the URL provided by these services using your feed reader.
With Google Reader, you’re essentially able to bypass this middle layer altogether – as both the conversion of a static site to RSS and the reading of RSS feeds will be handled by GReader itself.
If normal feeds are anything to go by, this service may very well double up as an archiving system for a particular web-page by keeping a detailed record of changes of time.
Just a couple of weeks back, FeedBurner, without much fanfare, stepped into the social arena. As it is with Google, the surprise came as an extremely useful feature: Automatic Tweeting based upon your feed.
Bloggers who use FeedBurner to publish their feeds can immensely benefit from this new addition. It does away with one whole extra step of using a third-party client (or the Twitter website)…
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Yesterday I came upon a couple of splogs ripping off my feeds and publishing the content as their own – lock, stock and barrel (if I may), including the ugly SHA1 hash that I was using as a digital fingerprint to detect content theft.
Digital fingerprints (a unique combination of random characters) happen to be a very good way of nabbing content rippers. 99.99% chances are…
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Here’s a nice trick I learnt a couple of days back. I wanted to display my feed subscriber count in a way that would match my site’s theme. I was tired of the vanilla feed-count display provided by FeedBurner – probably because you can find it on almost every other site these days (and I wanted something unique). So I got down to designing one…
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I recently purchased Managed DNS service from my web-host (ComputingHost) as a result of which I no longer have to depend upon their tech support to cater to my DNS record modification needs. Consequently, I decided to switch to the FeedBurner Pro domain based feed service. Domain based feed service means you can customise the FeedBurner to handle your feeds straight under your domains URL…
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