Setting Up RSS Feeds in HootSuite

+Vikram Kinkar is a member in a community that I manage.  We were discussing Google Reader going dark. He convinced me that perhaps I needed to revisit RSS feeds.  There are plenty of readers and aggregators, but he suggested Feedly.  Since one of the things on my drawing board is to feed The Circadians website with content by the community members, I figured I would take a look at it. I was about 20 minutes into research when I decided I would take a look at HootSuite's RSS tools as well.  I've used HootSuite for a while and really am not in the mood to try out a new application anyway.

The HootSuite Way

Setting it up is easy. You can go here and read their instructions.  Or you can watch the video below. 

Easy Enough. Where Are The Feeds? 

I think it's great that they have such and easy tool. I could very easily tell the application how many times I want to read the feed. I could even tell it where I wanted it to publish what it found.  But what I couldn't find was where the site feeds were, if they didn't have a link to them. And most of the sites had 'subscribe now' rather than links to the feeds.  I needed a way to save some time. The video below represents what I found.

Finding The URL Of The Feed

The hardest part of this is right clicking and saving the URL. Other than that, it's pretty straight forward.  Go here to get to the site referenced in the Video below. 

And The Point Is?

You can use Instant RSS Search with your current tool.  It doesn't matter what reader or aggregator you use. You might even use it with Outlook. There are so many quality products out there now, my advice is to look at something you're using now rather than reinventing the wheel. 

Parting Reminder

I'm working on Google Integration with this site. The purpose of this stuff is to give examples of how you might be able to use the integration on your own site. Here's what I'll tell you about the videos. 

• The were created using Cam Studio. A Free App. But you can use anything you want.
• After they were created they were uploaded to Google Drive.
• They were embedded into this site using Google Drive Tools.
• I don't have to worry about advertising on the videos. There is none.
• I can control access to the videos using Google Circles, Google Contacts, and Google Drive. So, I can make a subscription only site if I so desired. 
• I have 30 gig of storage now, with my paid Google Apps account.
• I'm using Blogger so I can 'share' the videos into communities and the permissions stay intact. 
• I'm using Blogger so I can simply "Plus" someone into the post...like I did +Vikram Kinkar 
• I'm using Blogger so I can auto Post to Google Plus using this method.

Life is good.  If you need anything don't hesitate to contact me. 

Let's Do This Thing!