BABY STEPS

As you know if you've been following this blog, I've been climbing the learning curve of online communications and social media. Teaching myself about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, media aggregators and so on has been and continues to be a daily challenge. Just when you think you're starting to get it, you notice that you've missed something. In my case, I missed something pretty important--how to get my blog to feed directly into my website.

It is humiliating to confess that I was retyping my blog entries into my website because I couldn't figure out how to make the RSS feed work. RSS, as you may recall from my most recent post, is Really Simple Syndication. It is a tool for allowing people to follow your blog and get alerts when you post new entries.

When I set up my website, the iWeb template I used had a blog page, and it offered the option of setting up an RSS feed from my blog to the site. But when I tried to set up the feed, I kept getting an error message.

Today, I finally figured out that RSS feeds have their own URL. Instead of entering my blog URL, http://marshakellysblog.blogspot.com, I entered feed://marshakellysblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. This is the URL that shows up when I click on the RSS symbol on my blog. Presto! It worked.

Now, instead of retyping each blog entry on my website, the new posts will automatically appear on my website. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. When I finish this post, we'll see if it shows up on my website. If it does, congratulate me. If not, I'll be back at the drawing board.