Library clips

sharing ideas thoughts and feedback

July 14, 2006

Trackbacks with messages

Filed under: blogs, conversation

As we know the trackback field enables you to ping blog posts when you publish your blog post. When you publish your blog post the posts you have pinged will have a link in the footer of their post. They will probably be alerted by email that someone has pinged their post.

NOTE: You don’t have to ping some just because you are talking about them in your post, you could just be pinging them because you want them to check out your post.

In an earlier post I also noted that if you can’t find a post to ping, just ping their “about” page…read on about category trackback posts.

Anyway my futher idea is what if you could leave a message about why you are tracking them back all within the trackback.

The receivers blog post will have a trackback link from your post accompanied by a brief message about the reason they are sending you a trackback.

Is this possible?

Customise your Zimbio OPML

Filed under: rss, readers, opml

I knew Zimbio added a nested OPML URL for each topic (Zimbio’s), but I didn’t know you could customise them.

On top of this you can even sort the items in each node…now that’s customisation.

This is spot on, I’ve always wanted to customise OPML, Zimbio is basically allowing you to include or not include certain modules in the OPML eg. Shared Feeds, group blog, links, etc…

NOTE: Each topic in Zimbio has a default OPML, when you customise your own it generates another OPML URL.

This is similar to picking and choosing folders of feeds or single feeds from your RSS Reader in order to make an OPML. I’m always sending people a batch of feeds (a selection from my RSS Reader), I even go to the trouble of packaging them in OPML using a 3rd party.

Most RSS Readers have a general OPML, some even have them for each folder, but wouldn’t it be good if you could select a folder/s or a selction of feeds from your RSS Reader and generate an OPML, how quick would that be.

Bloglines has a tell-a-friend feature, where you can send a friend an email about joining up with Bloglines, within this email you can even select some feeds from your account, so when they join up their account is pre-populated with some feeds…great idea.

I’m alluding to the idea that wouldn’t it be good if you could select some feeds from your account and generate an OPML, just like that.

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