This marks the beginning of bqdc. Before this post you’ll have to go back to my myspace blog to see the wonder of my bloggin’. I have made moderate effort to turn this into the definitive version, but it didn’t pay off and there is still plenty there that isn’t here. But, now, here we are. Without further ado, the original post:
Why? you ask? Is it the fame, fortune, and the emminent respectability of blogging that draws me away from a myspace-centric blog? Well, yes. But also there are a variety of things about hosting my own blog that will make life easier for me and my readers, not least of which is wordpress’ ability to subscribe to a blog’s comments, so instead of having to visit my blog hundreds of times to see if anyone has said anything interesting, or if i have perhaps responded to your comment, you’ll be able to just subscribe to my comment feed and the information (and comments) will be delivered to you, as if by magic.
But what is this “subscribe” that i speak of? I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile, since it is the biggest thing to happen to the internet since http, so here we go.
I’m going to start with an excellent video that is slightly out of date. There are a couple things in the last 30 seconds or so that i’m going to correct, but you can take it as gospel until you start reading again:
Got that? OK, now for the correction: the video makes it look like you’ve got 4 steps that you have to go through to start subscribing to blogs:
- Sign up for or download a newsreader
- Find some content that you’d like to subscribe to
- Click on the orange “news” square
- Copy the uri for the crazy-looking code page into your newsreader of choice
Ok, well, you don’t have to do all that. You still have to have an account, but if you’ve got a gmail accound then you’ve already got a gReader account. And, if you use firefox, opera, safari or even ie7 your job will be even easier, certainly there won’t be any crazy copy/pasting of code.
All four of the major browsers have the feed icon located somewhere inside or just outside of the location bar. The three good browsers have it inside the location bar. Look up right now and you should see it just to the right of the URI.
Firefox has a unique system for dealing with feeds: it basically re-directs you to an external feed reader or one of the many reader add-ons. So when you click on the feed icon for the first time it will give you a preview of the feed and ask you what you want to do with it. Just click what service you want from the drop-down and you’re on your way.
Safari, Opera, and IE7 all use internal readers, so if you click on the icon the feeds should just show up in your favorites list or homologue. I personally don’t like their implementations nearly as much as google reader’s, and a cursory glance around the websphere hasn’t revealed any way to change the default action in any of them. So, like i always say: you should use firefox. Of course if anybody knows a good way to change these settings let me know and i’ll change this paragraph.
What are you doing? Go subscribe to my blog, or its comments.
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