Friday, November 14, 2008

Message Boards Have Feeds

Maybe everybody already knows about this but I was quite pleased with myself when I discovered today that I can subscribe to individual message boards at RootsWeb. I don't see anywhere on the message board pages that tells you you can do this. There is no little orange feed icon or link that says subscribe or RSS. (If I'm just missing it someone please let me know.)

Edited 15 November. David pointed out that I was in fact missing the feed icon:
Once upon a time, RootsWeb had feeds for the mailing lists, too. They ditched that plan after a trial run.

If you use Firefox, keep an eye on the address bar. The RSS icon will appear whenever a page with a feed loads. In the case of the message boards, view the source of the page and you can see the feed in the HEAD.
Thanks David!

I use Google Reader and added a "Subscribe" button to my browser toolbar by following the directions found under the Manage subscriptions > Goodies tab > Subscribe as you surf. Simply drag the button to the tool bar! I have had the button for months and use it to subscribe to blogs quickly and easily but had never tried using it for anything else. I'll no longer have to remember to check the boards that I follow, now they'll end up in my reader.

2 comments:

David said...

Once upon a time, RootsWeb had feeds for the mailing lists, too. They ditched that plan after a trial run.

If you use Firefox, keep an eye on the address bar. The RSS icon will appear whenever a page with a feed loads. In the case of the message boards, view the source of the page and you can see the feed in the HEAD.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

Thanks David! I knew I must have been missing something. Somewhere along the line I did learn that you could view a page's source info. but I never had a reason to before now.