Blog category feed hack
A while back Micro Persuasion had a post mentioning building your own category feeds for a blog with IceRocket, reason being is you might only like some content of that blog, and not all posts, so your options are to generate a site search feed or subscribe to a category or tag, but not all blogs have a feed for their categories/tags, hence the hack.
Just thought I’d mention that I’ve included this hack in a blog post I always refer to when it comes to re-mixing feeds…here is a section from that post:
“MAKE A CATEGORY FEED WITHIN A SITE SEARCH (category feed for your blog)
Eg. using Blogdigger [RSS]
Blogs
Blogdigger (site:, together with subject:)
IceRocket Blogs (author: together with tag:)
For Blogdigger you can use blogID: instead of author:, and for IceRocket you can use +blogId: instead of author:
To find your blogID on both engines just do an author: search on IceRocket, and a site: search on Blogdigger, then on one of the results from that author click on focus, blogID is more unique than author as many people could have the same author name.
News
Yahoo! News (advanced search) this is broken
Topix (source:, together with cat:)
This is like making an RSS feed for a category in your blog (use the OR function to make a feed of multiple categories within your blog)
A more manual approach is to bookmark every post in a social bookmark manager with the tags labelled the same as your blog categories…the tag RSS feeds can be used as your blog category RSS feeds (del.icio.us allows you to combine categories)”
Here is an example with Blogdigger:
1. site:libraryclips.blogsome.com subject:folksonomy (60 hits)
2. blogID:239657 subject:folksonomy (27 hits)
Here is an example with IceRocket:
1. author:johnt tag:folksonomy (58 hits)
2. +blogId:1859961 tag:folksonomy (41 hits)
So it seems a site search on Blogdigger, and a author search on IceRocket give more results, and there is no noise either…I wonder why blogID doesn’t cut it.
[ADDED: Technorati profile page now has a tagcloud for your claimed blogs, if you just have one claimed blog this can act as categories/tags for your blog.
If I click on the folksonomy tag in my profile it will show all my posts just from my blog within the folksonomy category…now where’s the feed…Blogdigger and IceRocket lead in this feature.
Also when you click on the blog source from any result in a Technorati search it will show you the users profile, from here you can click a tag to see results just within that profile.
It would be good if you could do this sort of search from scratch,
eg. SEARCH IN THIS BLOG URL: http://libraryclips.blogsome.com
SHOW POSTS THAT HAVE BEEN TAGGED: folksonomy
SUBMIT
But you can’t do this as these 2 search fields are in different search panes…this is a pity as you can get the results the long way via the profile page why not be able to use the search interface to generate these kind of results…and spitting out a feed would be only standard.]
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In our case, we associate a blogID with a feed; we probably have multiple feeds for your single blog, so blogID (which really should be feedID) only pulls back posts that we got off of that feed (the others, ostensibly, were gotten off the other feed). Does that make sense?
Comment by Greg Gershman — January 13, 2006 @ 5:09 am