Fun With Featured Feeds

So, I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but for about a month or two, we've been running a sort of programming experiment, where we feature a different Journaler's feed on the AOL Journals main page:

At the moment, the feed is coming from Stebrel's Morality and the Law blog; we've been featuring folks for about a week at a time.

Most blogs have a feed associated with them (the two major types are Atom and RSS -- you don't need to know this). Feeds are a way to subscribe to the content of a blog; raw feeds aren't meant to be read by humans -- you typically plug them into a feedreader or customized start page (I will talk about some different types of these later in the week.)

For AOL Journals users, you can think of a blog's feed as kind of a like an Alert, only one that can be delivered to a feedreader program or even another Web page.

So, what we did here was take the feed URL for Stephen's blog, then plug it into a feed module in the publishing tool (called "Big Bowl") we use to publish the Journals main page.

Even if you didn't follow all that, you can see the results -- the headlines and the first couple of lines from Stephen's three most recent entries automatically get displayed on the page.

In addition, we've got three AOL Editors' Blogs' feeds in a tabbed module also on the page. This version of the feed module only shows the headline, though if you hover over it with your mouse, you'll see the first few lines of the entry:

There isn't a feed module that you can use right now in your Journals, though there is one for AIM Pages -- for example, in my AIM Pages profile, I'm displaying the feed from this blog in the lower right column.

Anyway, in the current Journals main page test, we've basically been highlighting the feeds of blogs that for one reason or another probably weren't good fits as potential Guest Editors. This is just another way to highlight Journals.

We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible with feeds -- at the very minimum, I'd like to have an entire page of featured feeds and canned searches from people's blogs. We're still working on it.

In the meantime, if you would like to have your blog's feed featured on the Journals main page, drop me or Editor Jeff an e-mail or comment.

If you know your blog's feed address, that's great, although the smarter feed tools can find it automatically. To find out, click the "Get the Feed" link near the top of your Journal -- you'll see a list of feedreaders you can click to add the feed to, or click the arrow next to "Get the feed manually" to see the feed addresses listed:

We'll be talking more about feeds and feedreaders this week.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, featured feeds