Tips n' Tricks

Thanks to Josh's recent comment about the fact that these blogs supply site feeds, I thought I'd whip up a quick list of cool features Blogger has that you might not know about. Each header is a link to a page that describes the feature.

1. Site Feeds

What site feeds allow you to do is create an active bookmark that will display direct links to each entry in a blog as they are updated (in semi-realtime). For example, I have a bookmark that says "Drop My Straw" in my toolbar in Firefox. When I click on it, it opens a drop down box that shows all of the latest entries on the blog. From there, I can select which article I want to view.

If you use Blogger, your site's feed is: http://[yoursitename].blogspot.com/atom.xml

If you are posting to your own blog, you don't need to do anything to enable this feature. As a viewer of blogs, however, you need to setup a live bookmark in your browser to use the feature. This will vary from browser to browser, but I can say from personal experience, it was incredibly easy to do in Firefox... and since Firefox is ported to basically every OS on the planet, you can always use this option.

This is Drop My Sraw's Feed: http://dropmystraw.blogspot.com/atom.xml

2. Email Updating

Email updating lets you update your blog simply by emailing the contents of your post to the blog. When your blog will receives the email, it will format the text and contents and, depending on your settings, either post it or save it as a draft for you to post.

3. Telephone Updating

You can call your blog and have it auto-update with an MP3 of your message. Outrageous! This feature isn't actually provided by Blogger, but by a 3rd party. It seems really easy to use. Just click the link and check it out.

If you have any questions, let me know!