July 01, 2005

Using 'My Yahoo' for blogging

If you have read my article here I talked about using Live Bookmarks to syndicate blog feeds. I recently discovered a new way to utilize blog feeds (thanks to Tanya). If you have a Yahoo account (they are free) you can create a My Yahoo page, it only takes a second. My Yahoo is completely customizable. You can display blog feeds, your favorite comic strips, movie information, TV schedule, current events, news feeds, and on and on. You can even change the layout, colors, or pick from plenty of pre-made templates. I choose just the standard one. This page is like your personal dashboard to the web. Anything that has a feed, you can add it. It is set up in easily editable modules.

Click image to see full size photo:
My Yahoo

You can add your favorite blog feeds. In the screenshot above you can see where I added Interblogging and the five most recent posts (at least at the time of the screen shot). This is what it looks like when you subscribe to a blog feed. Although I have mine set up to only show new post titles only, you can also show a description of each post under the titles.

If you want to add a blog that does not have an XML feed, you might want to e-mail them and let them know they need to make their feeds available. For sites that use Blogger, you can usually type in their address + "/atom.xml" and get their feed. Since my address is http://interblogging.blogspot.com, my XML file will be located at http://interblogging.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

6 Comments:

I'm setting mine up now...thanks :).
posted by Blogger Chastity at 9:27 PM  
Thanks for the heads up on this. I use my.yahoo at work and may have to set this up at home now.
posted by Blogger Christian D. at 5:51 PM  
You know I was just trying to modify my.yahoo.com at work to accept the XML stuff and it's not working. Any suggestions? I was trying to use moates as an example and another site I visit and neither one would work. Odd, but I thought I'd see if you had any ideas.
posted by Blogger Christian D. at 10:06 AM  
First I would navigate to the address manually to make sure the feed words. For moats it is: http://moatesgarage.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

If the XML page pulls up in your browser then everything should work fine in My Yahoo.

Go to Add Content from your My Yahoo page. Then find Add RSS by URL. Paste the address of the XML page into the textbox labeled “URL” and click Add.

Sometimes My Yahoo will say something like, "Can't find XML". If you click Add a few more times it should work. It does that to me on occasion, but usually it works okay.
posted by Blogger Interblogger at 4:13 PM  
Thanks. I'll give it a try, but honestly I think I'll say with reading my sites through Sage in firefox...now that I think about it of course. How many spots do you need an XML feed! :) I guess you can tell your addicted if you've got them everywhere!
posted by Blogger Christian D. at 9:05 PM  
Sage is pretty neat. It is almost identical to 'Live Bookmarks' only it has a neat little sidebar with it. So far it seems My Yahoo is the most customizable. It is only a matter or preference. Try a few until you find the one that works for you. I know Thunderbird (Mozilla’s POP3 client) is supposed to have a great aggregator, but I have never used it.
posted by Blogger Interblogger at 10:22 PM