How To Navigate the Blue MauMau Site with RSS Feeds, Part I

Posted Sat, 2007/10/27 - 11:15 by michael webster

The First of A Three Part Post on Navigating Blue MauMau

This is a three part post on navigating the Blue MauMau (BMM) site, with an emphasis on how to use RSS feeds effectively. Part I explains what a RSS feed is, Part II explores the RSS feeds on BMM, and Part III demonstrates how we can use a special RSS feed to increase the accuracy and depth of articles about franchising.

In part, this post is prompted by Mom's and Paul's (registered members) queries about how to find comments that are no longer on the front page. Mom's and Paul's questions about finding comments are part of a larger problem that all web news sites face. A web news site is constantly updating its front page, partly to show something new to the google search index robot.

While the flow of news and information is required for high rankings, it makes it difficult for the average consumer to find or locate part of the stream that is no longer front and centre, the "Navigation Problem". There are several well known solutions, which I am not going to spend much time on. First, you could either search the site. Second, you could use whatever pagination there is to review the site. Neither of these solutions are without their problems. Searching requires some unique way of identifying what has lost in the stream.

How do you do that if information passed you by and you didn't see it at the time? Pagination is a clumsy attempt to impose paper solutions on digital medium. The better way to solve the Navigation Problem is to subscribe to those parts of the news stream which have been tagged as RSS channels. BMM has posted an excellent video on RSS feeds which tells you how to use them in general to keep up with all the blogs you read. I also have a good page on how RSS feeds protect your privacy much better than email subscriptions to a site. Try subscribing on my site to test it out.

Now here is the cool part. Parts of the BMM site are tagged as RSS feeds. To find out what channels you can subscribe to, go to the RSS Feeds link on the bottom of each page.

You can click on any of the orange RSS feeds to subscribe to that channel in the BMM site. (Google on "free RSS newsreaders" to find an RSS reader that you can use.) The RSS channel will then pop in your newsreader. So what is the answer to Paul's and Mom's questions about locating past comments? Why, subscribe to the RSS feed of BMM comments of course! Just hit this link here and you will be subscribed to all comments on the BMM site, which will be broadcast to your newsreader so that you can read all the comments at your leisure. Part II of this post will introduce you to the other RSS feeds, and Part III will explain how we can, as a group, increase the accuracy and depth of news about franchising using a special RSS feed at BMM.

Franchise topic:
- franchising

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The International Association of Franchisees and Dealers was formed in January, 2010. Currently, I am the Chair of the Strategic Committee which is overseeing the development of the IAFD and its business plan.

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