Snow Day: Exploring RSS Feeds for the Uninitiated

If you look at the second tab of my blog you will find 275 jewelry blogs listed. I actually see every new post through my RSS feed:

Not particularly interesting? Here is what it looks like as I am reading posts:

I can click on the title and go directly to the blog itself if I want a bigger picture or if I want to comment; or I can click the previous or next button at the bottom of the post to see a new post in the list. In this way I can easily click through over 100 posts a day. I admit I do not read every single post but I see them all.

I have set up a publicly accessible RSS reader which you can use for all of the blogs I subscribe to named KJs Beadacious Beads Blog Links.

I won't lie to you with 275+ blogs it is going to be slow to open.  It is also not quite a true RSS feed.  Instead it is a slide show of the most recent posts of all of the blogs I read.

Here are your basic selections:

There is of course the tab named jewelry which links to most of the sites listed in my Blog Links tab.  Most of the other tabs are easy to figure out, but let me toss a few hints. 

The ... and Other Colorful Things tab are the blogs I follow for color inspiration.  Let me highly recommend Fresh Hues - go ahead and visit her page and play around but be sure to set aside some time.  Let me also highly recommend you add kero.i.am's tumblr page to your bookmarks.  This tumblr is amazing and goes on and on and on.  Again set aside some time just to surf. 

Neglected But Inspiring Blogs are not necessarily neglected but they certainly do not fit my other categories. 

What you can expect to see is something like this:

This is from the decorating tab.  If you click on the top picture that will take you directly to the blog.  Immediately under that top picture is the date of the last post.  Clicking on one of the five lower pictures will bring it to the top position; likewise the previous and next buttons will do the same.  However, this public RSS feed will not bring up posts or pictures of anything older than what is already pictured. 

You are just as likely to see a slide show with all the same pictures, like this:

or one that just has a newpaper logo like this:

 

I do not know why the same picture repeats nor why some blogs show only the news logo.  I do know that the news logo is a default and may appear if the posts are old or if they have no pictures. 

You may also notice that there are blogs in the list which have not been updated in years- they remain in my list because they are still inspiring and continue to provide useful information.

I love seeing what everyone is up to.  I welcome all the inspiration that comes my way.  I could not possibly keep up without an RSS feed.  I use Netvibes as my reader.  It is free unless you need in-depth analysis of web traffic. 

If it is too cold to go out and you need a break from whatever you are doing, click on the link for my public RSS reader at Netvibes and see what your fellow artisans have been up to.

One final note- the only jewelry blog I showed in this post was Olive Bites- Cat was my first follower.  I found many jewelry posts I wanted to show as examples but since I could not narrow it down and did not want anyone to feel slighted I selected from my other tabs.