Library clips

Check this out, you can read your favourite blog via Findory

…here’s my blog…uniquely, it churns out an RSS feed for related articles.

Not only that it also shows related blogs and related articles…good stuff!

…I’ve put this on the sidebar under Abstract Index.

For the budding librarians I also noticed LISFeeds presents abstracts of your latest posts.

Another cool feature is Findory Neighbours

…here are my neighbours, I’ve added this to the sidebar under Statistics.

Then it got me thinking, how do the other RSS engines display your posts

…I consulted the RSS engines that I know of that do site or url syntax searches.

I found that Blogdigger can act as an abstract index of your blog via the author syntax…see author:(johnt)…and also generates an RSS feed.
(67 current hits)

Since Blogdigger also indexes del.icio.us (it is an RSS engine after all) my results are a bit varied as I also use the author name, johnt, for my del.icio.us account.

I don’t think subscribing to this feed would be accurate, as it is not unique enough, as many authors could be called johnt.

Blogdigger only indexes del.icio.us at the tag level, not at the user level…well that’s what it does for me, but then I’ve seen results at the user level for other people, check out this random example.

Now you get virtually the same results by using the site syntax, see mine at site:libraryclips.blogsome.com.
(75 current hits)

That’s a bit odd, if anything the author search should be higher as I use the johnt author name for 2 different services.

If you see one of the results on the previous search query, you can click on the focus link which gives you a search for the blogID, as it turns out this has an equal number of current hits, at 75…here it is, blogID:150597.

I also have another del.icio.us account that is a mirror for my blog (del.icio.us/libraryclips)
…so when you do the author search, author:(libraryclips) in Blogdigger, you get a Title index of my blog, with a RSS feed to boot (but you’re better off subscribing to the native feed from the del.icio.us account).

I thought I’d try Feedster as their fielded searching is very comprehensive, and RSS feeds are returned for every search.

As usual there is the author search, but as mentioned before I don’t think this is unique enough.

The url syntax also included hits from my comments permalinks and from del.icio.us, see url:libraryclips.blogsome.com
(184 current hits)

This is the best so far considering this post I’m writing now is my 176th post.

NOTE: the total number of hits was “1,118 results / Page 1 of 75″, but when I got to the 13th page the number changed to “184 results / Page 13 of 13″, what’s going on, these numbers are alive.

Also when I left a space inbetween the url syntax and the search term I got a different result, “1,087 results / Page 1 of 73, when I got to the 12th page it said “167 results / Page 12 of 12″.

It seems that when you click next page of results, then next page, and so on, the total number of results changes for some reason.

The site syntax (with and without the space), returned at “167 results / Page 12 of 12″ (same as the url syntax)

Too bad about this one:

“feed_id
If you know Feedster’s ID of a feed, you can restrict to that feed browser feed_id:47; we are working on a method of exposing feed IDs”

Lastly is PubSub…but I’m too tired now

…their Syntax Help page includes searching by “source:” and by “uri:”

Wow, the number of RSS feeds to track this blog are crazy (stupid idea if I wanted to track statistics of my readership, especially for business purposes, but that’s not the case here, and if it was, it’s way too late).

Hang on…I forgot about Google…you can subscribe to the RSS of latest posts according to these search queries via Google Alert.

site:libraryclips.blogsome.com
(403 current hits)

Seems to return results of the date archive permalinks, so that’s why this number is boosted, but the results are pretty clean as they all seem to come from the blog site.

inurl:libraryclips.blogsome.com
(432 current hits)

This was expected as other services such as bookmarking managers build on top of the orginal url.

Must take into account that Google doesn’t index as fast as the popular RSS engines, when I last checked it was 4 days behind for my blog.

I won’t bother mentioning the other traditional search engines that do site and inurl searches.

These are the number of ways you can subscribe to recent posts:

• My native feed
• Feedburner feed
• del.icio.us (mirror account) feed
• Findory (source) feed…this is a feed for related articles to your blog
• Blogdigger (author) feed
• Blogdigger (other author) feed
• Blogdigger (site) feed
• Blogdigger (blogID) feed
• Feedster (author) feed
• Feedster (url) feed
• Feedster (site) feed
• Feedster (feed_id) feed [coming soon]
• PubSub (source) feed
• PubSub (uri) feed
• Google (site) feed
• Google (inurl) feed
• BlogPulse (url) feed

Oops I forget these:

• Talkr feed [text to audio podcast feed]
• Bot-a-blog feed [rss to email feed]
• Winksite feed [mobile feed]
• Messenger Alert Me [IM feed]

Then there are the category feeds:

• via the blog itself
• via Blogdigger, see here
• via del.icio.us/libraryclips

And lastly the search feeds and link feeds, although these don’t apply to viewing recent posts.

If I’ve missed anyone or anything it will hopefully be here.

I don’t know how I got here, but in the end there is nothing as good as the native feed.

…I must conclude that the winner for the closest number of posts and quality of results was the Feedster url syntax closely followed by the site syntax.

…and that’s that!

Actually, there’s more…

[ADDED 25/07/05: BlogPulse RSS Summaries]