Wednesday 13 March 2013

Flickr ~ How to subscribe ~ RSS feed...


So you've signed up to be a member of a Flickr group and you are keen to keep up with the discussions of the group. But how do you do this without continually logging in to your Flickr account? 


I was faced with this dilemma when I signed up for the Crafty Cooks Apron and Recipe Swap. Within days of the swap being announced there were 5 active discussion threads. I didn't want to miss a post, but neither did I want to keep logging in and checking.


While looking around, I noticed the RSS feed icon down the bottom of both the Group Pool and Discussion pages.


Clicking on the icon brought up the following message... This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below, and a page of code that I didn't understand. Clicking on the hyperlinked word, Feed, next to the RSS icon resulted in the same message. I tried a few other groups, all with the same result.


Easy solution... just copy and paste the URL (web address) into your favourite Feed Reader.

If you've been reading my Facebook posts, you'll know that I haven't been overly happy with Google Reader over the last few days, however, it's what I still use for keeping up with blogs.


However, in this instance, I'm not subscribing via Google Reader. I'm using my email program. On a Mac using the standard Mail program, it's easy to subscribe to any RSS feed. In fact, that is how I used to follow the few blogs I read, before I began blogging myself. I still do keep up with some blogs this way. 

As you can see by the screen shots below, you don't need to type in your email address. You can subscribe to any blog this way, too. Open your email program and on a Mac...



I'm sure if this can be easily done on a Mac, there'll be a way of doing it on a PC, but not having one to check with, I don't know this for sure. I doubt if you can do this if you are checking your email with a Web based email program. eg; gmail, yahoo, but I don't know.

As far as I'm aware, photos won't show up as part of the RSS feed when subscribing to a Flickr group, only discussion posts.

Whilst I was typing this post, I noticed an email come in... a post in a new discussion topic, for the Apron swap.

This is the 9th post in the blogging tips series... How Does Your Blog Look.

Threading My Way_How Does Blog Look


... Pam

7 comments:

  1. Something new to add to my list of things to try out Pam!

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  2. I never knew that! I hate having to check back on flickr to keep up with discussions. Thanks for sharing, Pam!

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  3. Thank you for the Lesson , mirjam

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  4. You're so stinkin' smart about all these online bloggy things. Thanks for sharing!

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  5. Did you notice that they are getting rid of Google Reader? A message popped up yesterday when I got on. I hate getting stuff in my email because it gets lost.

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    1. Yeah, I saw that. I'm comfortable with Google Reader and really don't want to change, but we'll have no choice. At least we have until July to explore the options.

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  6. I've always done this for Flickr discussion feeds. I paste them directly into "subscribe" in the reader as I don't like having 500 emails with blog updates, I much prefer to use a reader. Don't worry about not liking Google Reader, it'll be gone soon anyway...!

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