No Feed? No Problem…
There are millions of sites out there on the internet and keeping up on all of them is a daunting task. A better approach is to subscribe to your favorite sites via an RSS feed. It keeps track of what you’ve read and haven’t read as well as aggregates all the sites in to one spot.
My personal choice amongst feed readers has been Google Reader. You get a nice smooth interface, web access, and you have the power of Google search to help you find articles you read in the past. Also, I’m an avid user of many other Google services such as Gmail, PicasaWeb, and Maps, so it was a nature fit.
The biggest drawback of RSS is that not every site has an RSS feed available. That means in order to be updated when the site changed, you had to actually navigate to the site. This is very cumbersome when a site is updated once a month or sometimes less.
With the latest Google Reader update, the monitoring of feedless site has been added. All you do is enter the web address in the Add a Subscription box.
An aside: Francetucky is a short lived experimental cartoon by a guy named Drew who does a couple of other cartoons, my other favorite being Toothpaste for Dinner – a crudely drawn comic with a wry sense of humor.
Back on topic: Once you hit the Add button, Google pops up a warning basically saying that the site doesn’t provide a feed and that Google is providing updates on the site for you.
The biggest downside to this is that I can see my Google Reader growing by leaps and bounds as I toss more and more crap in there that I really don’t need.
Anyone use any other services to monitor sites without feeds? What sites do you frequent (with or without feeds)? Toss it in the comments.
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Good post. I was excited to see this addition to Reader as well. One trick I’ve done in the past is marry Google Reader and Google Alerts, which allows you to save custom Google searches. The great thing about Google Alerts is that you can create an RSS feed for any of your saved searches. You can then add that feed to Reader.
For example, let’s say you’re really interested in tips for getting things done (GTD). You could set up a Google Alert like
+tips “getting things done” GTD
Now, whenever Google comes across a new page that matches that search, it will put the page in your RSS feed, and you’ll see new updates like any other blog entry or article in Reader. You can even rename the feeds in Reader and tag/organize them like any other RSS feed. All of Google’s many search operators and syntax forms can be used to create as fancy of a search as you’d like.
Before Google rolled out this latest solution for sites with no feed, I would use Google Alerts to accomplish the same thing by putting
site:domain.com
in the search query. This ensures that I only get updates from that specific site.
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I have used Google Alerts (I monitor “digitante” on the net), but I had never thought about using it with the “site:” operator. I still don’t think it would return just a single page unless you could do something like “site:http://www.thedigitante.com/2010/02/02/no-feed-no-problem/”. However, I never tried it and only had a couple of instances in which I would have used it. This new Reader feature is much simpler and will be very simple to use.