Feeds for dummies

Andy · December 4, 2005

Here's how you use feeds at SmugMug, with a cool browser like Firefox.

1. Use or get Firefox.
2. Surf to a SmugMug page
3. If you see the Feed button at the bottom, you can "subscribe" to this page - and when it's updated you'll know!

All you do is click on that little orange square thingy the bottom of your Firefox broswer page, select "subscribe to XXXXX's RSS Feed" and then click OK when the add to bookmarks window comes up.

That's it! Now look in your bookmarks and you'll see that page you're subscribing to:

SmugMug Help Page on Feeds

Questions? Holler at us here, we can take it!

Mike Lane · December 4, 2005

RSS Feeds for studs...
Reading your own feed in Firefox is okay and might be somewhat useful, but why not make it so anyone with any browser can read it? Maybe you want to make it so you have list of recently updated galleries on your blog for example. Something like this perhaps?

Well here's how to do it.

First go into your smugmug page and scroll down to the bottom and click on either the RSS Feed button or the ATOM feed button (it doesn't matter which).

Copy what is in the address bar for the page that you just opened.

Go to www.feeddigest.com and paste the address that you just copied into the blue box

And then click next. On the options page change the Digest Options to whatever you want and then in the digest layout/template click to edit the template manually

When the manual editor opens up look for the following:

%DESCRIPTIONPLAIN, 100%

and change it to %DESCRIPTION% (the descriptionplain value strips the html out of the rss feed and we need that in order to have an image preview)

Then click to activate the digest

It should say that the digest was created successfully. If it does click on "Get code to include this digest to your site"

Simply copy the Javascript code and paste it into any website (including a smugmug page or a blog or whatever!)

If you don't know what php is then don't use the PHP include. This will work just fine as javascript. If you are familiar with PHP you can include this on any PHP-enabled site (a wordpress or typepad blog for example).

Andy · December 4, 2005

I knew if I did a wimpy job you'd come by with the "studs" version.

Hmm feeddigest, eh? Kinda like this...click on "photogs galleries"

Andy · December 4, 2005

BTW it would be much *more* studly if you did it on a Mac.

:hide

Mike Lane · December 4, 2005

Andy wrote:

I knew if I did a wimpy job you'd come by with the "studs" version.

Hmm feeddigest, eh? Kinda like this...click on "photogs galleries"

We could make it so that del.icio.us feed doesn't have to go through feeddigest and can show up right there on your smugmug page if you'd like

Andy · December 4, 2005

Mike Lane wrote:

We could make it so that del.icio.us feed doesn't have to go through feeddigest and can show up right there on your smugmug page if you'd like

Mkay... I'll have my web-guy get on that

Mike Lane · December 4, 2005

Andy wrote:

Mkay... I'll have my web-guy get on that

where would you want it?

pat.kane · December 4, 2005

Andy wrote:

3. If you see the Feed button at the bottom, you can "subscribe" to this page - and when it's updated you'll know!

I tried Feeds a while back in FF1.0.7 and never really understood this.

How do you know what's been updated?

Thanks,
Pat

Feeds for dummies

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