Using My Yahoo To Get Blog Updates

If you're like me, you start thinking about what's for lunch when someone starts talking about RSS feeds...

But wait! I just figured out how to use My Yahoo default internet page to get updates from my favorite blogs! And guess what? That's using an RSS feed delivery mechanism, only I don't have to know it or understand it.

Little ol' non-techie me figured out how to stay informed whenever some of my favorite blogs post something new. Okay, I had to ask Denise, but still...

Here was my dilemma: I was relying on Bloglet to stay informed. Every day I get an email from Bloglet listing new posts for some of my favorite blogs. But not everybody has that feature on their blogs. So in order to stay current, I used a word doc list of links to my favorite blogs and manually went down the list, clicked on their links, one-by-one to see new postings. Bad idea, too much time...

Here's what I did. I set up My Yahoo as my default Internet page, because everybody knows that when you do, you can add your own blogs to the page and somehow you get listed with Yahoo without paying their entry fee of $300 or so. Okay, then I figured out how I could also add a few other blogs to that page. It's easy when there is a little My Yahoo button on a blog, just click on it, and presto, the blog appears on your My Yahoo page, along with current posts.

But when there isn't that little icon on a blog, what to do? Well, here it is, folks:

1. Right click on the "Syndicate this Site - XML" link on a blog
2. A small window opens, scroll and left click on Properties
3. A little window pops up with an Address URL, something like http://coachezines.typepad.com/coachezinesblog/index.rdf
4. Highlight it and copy it.
5. Go to your My Yahoo page, find the link that says "Add Content" and click
6. To the right of the 'Find Content' thingy, there is a little link that says "Add RSS by URL", click on that.
7. Then paste the rdf URL you copied into the ADD space/little window thingy.
8. That's it! You're done.

A couple of times it didn't work for me and I had to repeat the process all over, but it took the 2nd time. And a couple of times it didn't work because the URL I copied didn't end in 'rdf'.

Now, when I pull up my Internet page, which is by default My Yahoo, I have news feeds that I have selected, Doonsebury comics, the tennis tournament results, my local cinemas, AND, TA-DAH!....all my favorite blogs with their latests postings. Well, sometimes I've noticed that Yahoo is a little slow about posting the latest posts, but Denise tells me that is because the authors forgot to use Pingomatic...

But that's another story. Coming soon: Patsi takes a peek at Pingomatic and learns to do it automatically each time she posts! (Sigh...some of us take longer to learn than others, but what counts is there is progress being made!)

Comments

[Denise Wakeman]

If you see a Feedburner button on a blog, you can click on that as well to access MyYahoo. If Feedburner is set up on a blog, then you can subscribe to MyYahoo, Newsgator and Bloglines all with one click.
http://www.feedburner.com

[syd]

great post. you should add an "add to my yahoo" button to your blog to make it easier for folks - http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide

[Denise Wakeman]

The Feedburner button gives a direct link to MyYahoo.