Splice in updates into your blog feed
In past posts I’ve harped on about creating an RSS feed for a single blog post. Reason for this is that some of my posts list a whole heap of tools eg. blog chat widgets. From time to time I will add new links to these posts, so how do I notify people about these updates.
Choices
- write a new post (that would be just silly)
- use a page scraper to create a Feedwhip or PonyFish RSS feed for that post…see here
- site search for a term in the post and use that as an RSS feed for that post…see same link above
- since a blog post can have its own comments RSS feed, you can add a new link to the blog post, then add a comment notfying people that you have added new stuff to this blog post…see here
Since the content in the RSS comments feed on each post will be displayed in the general comments RSS feed, it is best to write an explanatory comment:
eg. UPDATE on the post Blog Chats. New items added are…………..
- display an RSS feed on your blog post from a 3rd party, like Loopnote:
eg. if you regularly update 5 blog posts, you could make 5 Loops, and a feed from each Loop could be promoted on the corresponding blog post
Each time you update the blog post, you would then go to the corresponding Loopnote and post about the update.
SIDE NOTE: You could use a traditional blog instead of Loopnote, but who wants to create a blog just for updates, and you certainly don’t want to create lots of update blogs for each post
NOTE: Another option is to use a note tagger like Simpy notes, TagFacts, TextSnippets, Notetagger, Markaboo, etc…as long as they output in RSS.
- display an RSS feed on your blog post from a 3rd party that doesn’t have it’s own HTML page, all it has is feed content
eg. ShortText, publi.sh, Sabifoo (IM your updates), etc…
New idea
Most people know you can splice your del.icio.us links into your Feedburner blog feed, the posts of these del.icio.us links will not appear in your blog, but they will appear in your RSS feed.
So why not splice in an update RSS feed into your Feedburner feed…this feed could be a feed from any of the 3rd party tools like, Loopnote, ShortText, publi.sh, Sabifoo, etc…
After you update a past post, go to your update feed (eg. publi.sh) and type in your update.
Now this update will be a post in your blog RSS feed only, not the blog website.
The only drawback with this idea compared to using page scrapers like Feedwhip or Ponyfish (which are also 3rd parties I guess) is that once you update your blog post you have to also update your special update feed (which is spliced with your Feedburner feed), whereas the page scrapers will recognise the changes and automate a post on your behalf.
But then again using a feedscraper is going back to the old method of having a single feed for a blog post, whereas our new method is that it is spliced with your main blog feed.
NOTE: I’d find it handy if Feedburner had an option to splice in my Box.net feed (online file storage).
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