Marsco Information & Research

I rely on Bloglines for reading blogs, but occasionally you come across a blog that doesn’t have a feed, what to do?  I’ve had a post about RSSPect sitting in my Bloglines saved items for over a year now so thought I should finally investigate.  RSSPect requires a simple sign-up process, and then automatically takes you to a page to create feeds from your own content.  If you want to create a feed from someone else’s blog, you need to click on the AnySite tab.

You insert the url and then choose what sort of updates you want, major and minor are the default.  If you choose all you will probably find out every time they change links, do something to the sidebar etc.  Once you’ve completed that page it takes you through the final stage, what you want to do with the feed.  I use Firefox as my browser and it is set to subscribe any new feeds automatically to Bloglines.  I clicked on the feed url and then was taken straight to the Bloglines page where I could set it up.  Simple!

Another blogging break from Marsco, this time due to house move and lack of broadband.

I was showing someone Terapad (seen at I want to) the other day, it describes itself as ‘beyond blogging’, which it is.  It’s really more of a content management system, as it also comes with  PayPal shop facilities, forums, calendar, galleries, CV search etc - and it’s free.  It’s certainly something I would look into if I were selling something, and I can see that a lot of the craft and design blogs I read would benefit from using it.  If you go and have a look at the site you can find lots of examples of the different ways that people use Terapad.

Bloglines launched a new feature the other week, the Image Wall.  It’s basically a big mosaic made up of a variety of different images from RSS feeds.  It’s quite fun to watch for a while.

Unfortunately it meant that Bloglines was being inadvertantly blocked from some libraries and schools because there is no way of controlling the content of the image wall (it does come with a disclaimer though).  Many users told Bloglines about this and how they didn’t want to have to block the site but were faced with no option.

So what did Bloglines do?  They just moved the image wall over to a new url.  Simple yet brilliant, didn’t take a lot but makes a whole load of people happier.  You can see it here.

I read a stupid amount of blogs, and am always finding more I want to follow.  If it wasn’t for the mighty Bloglines, I’d never keep up.  Of course, there’s always the view that I should just read less blogs and streamline it down, quality not quantity and all that.  Not sure I’m ready for that just yet…

Another post that’s been sitting in my saved items on Bloglines is one from Phil Bradley, linking to a brilliant post all about Bloglines, and how to use it.  If you want to find out more about RSS and Bloglines, or know someone who does/should, go and have a read.

Hey there, long time no blog.

BlogHer featured an interview with Susie Hawksworth the other week, and her blog is definitely worth checking out if you want to know more about life in the voluntary sector and using open-source software. And she likes chocolate, and knitting blogs.

LibrarianInBlack has written about Thomas Ford Memorial Library using WordPress for indexing obituaries and creating a local history archive. Great idea, as blogging software is either freeor cheap and generally user friendly for the less techy-minded amongst us.

Great post at the Performancing blog about using a blog to help manage an online community.  Great idea!  Manage a 'real' community too, if you have a club or society or group you can post news and meeting details, members can comment and discuss issues, everything is kept in the archives, photos can be shown - endless!