feed – Open Thinkering

Education Eye: an RSS reader for those who don’t feed-read…

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

I’m a big fan of Futurelab‘s work. I’ve used their resources, been part of their Teachers as Innovators project, and even helped Dan Sutch (legend that he is) run a Futurelab seminar at BETT.

When they launched Education Eye I didn’t really get it. Now I do. RSS feeds pulled in from blogs and news outlets (including, yes, this one) and presented in a very visual fashion. I love the way that the dots are colour-coded according to ‘inspiration’, ‘Policy’, ‘Practice’ and so-on, with certain posts starred as Futurelab staff favourites. Awesome.

I mentioned on Twitter to Dan that this would make an amazing screensaver (like the Digg ones). Turns out they’re already working on it! And not only that, but they’re working on an Event Eye, ‘an indexed, searchable, content aggregator that pulls together the best content from the web about a particular conference or event.’ Double awesome.

Logging in gives you extra features. Check it out and share it with someone today! 😀

PS Dan had a bit of a disaster with his Twitter account! Help him rebuild his network by following him: @dansutch

Got a blog? Do this simple thing to boost your readership.

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Doug Belshaw

Image CC BY derrickkwa @ Flickr

I tried to do something very simple yesterday. Surprisingly, it caused me a bit of a headache. What was it? I just wanted to subscribe to some blogs via email.

Why would I want to subscribe to blogs via email? Well, for all I love Feedly, I have to go to a different location to access this. This involves a physical and conceptual shift. Making blog posts (or links to them) appear in my email inbox means I can’t really ignore them. In other words, I’m more likely to keep up-to-date.

However, when I went to subscribe to some blogs the option to subscribe by email wasn’t available to me (necessitating the use of xFruits) or seemed to be available but then didn’t work.

It’s trivial (and free!) to enable readers to subscribe via email to your blog. Here’s how:

1. Go to Feedburner and login using your Google account.

2. ‘Burn’ (i.e. add) your feed to Feedburner (you can find your feed URL by clicking on the RSS icon to the right in your address bar when you visit your blog):

3. Within Feedburner, click on the ‘Publicize’ tab and then on ‘Email subscriptions’ on the left-hand side:

4. Follow the (clear) instructions as to how to proceed. It shows you how you can add the option to subscribe via email to your blog’s sidebar.

5. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab within Feedburner and then ‘BrowserFriendly’ on the left-hand side:

6. Follow the instructions, enabling the BrowserFriendly service.

7. Make sure all the links to your RSS feed on your blog point towards the new Feedburner feed. If you’ve got a self-hosted WordPress-powered blog, the easiest way to do this is to download the relevant plugin to do this for you!

The result, if you follow these steps, will be that if users click on your RSS they should see something like this:

If you need any extra help or have some tips please use the comments section below! 😀