How to create an AllBlog Feed?


If you have different blogs and like to offer your readers a way to subscribe to just one Feed, use Feedburner for statistics and other features, strips as few as possible of whatever embeds or features you have, and finally be easy on your part as the admin, then there’s two web-applications I can recommend.


Follow up:

First is ofcourse my favorite web-based reader – Google Reader. Google Reader have a feature where you can ‘publicize’ a folder/tag/label so you can post or share or let other people subscribe to it. Just be going to the “Manage Subscriptions” you will be able to publicize your folder/tag/label.

How to combine your different feeds into one?

  1. Just subscribe to your own feeds and put them all under one folder/tag
  2. Click “Tags”
  3. Go to “Manage Subscriptions” and click the grey feed icon on your folder/tag to change it to “public”
  4. You will now have a “view public page” link, click on it
  5. Once there, look at the right side of the page and copy the Atom Feed URL of your folder/tag
  6. Go to your Feedburner account, and ‘burn’ your combined feed.

You are done!

But as I’ve said above, we need to have a service that strips less of our stuff, and I noticed that Google Reader strips unknown embeds like new video services. You will not even see those video embeds when reading normally from Google Reader, so that’s the disadvantage with using it.

Secondly, Google Reader’s “publicize” page/feed doesn’t sort your posts on a “general” date basis but rather sorts it out first on a “per subscription” then “per date”, thus as you will see from this example – gameshogun.ws Blognet via Laibeus Lord, the posts are sorted as such – per blog/subscription, then per date.

This is confusing. I haven’t tested it yet, but it should be okay for your next new posts. Just that, the first time you set your “AllBlog” Feed, it will be sorted like that.

Is there another service that can do what we want? Yes.

Welcome FeedBlendr, the second option.

FeedBlendr is simple, type the name of your Blended feeds, and enter all the feeds that you want to be included and you are done. As simple as that. Easy on our end, the administrators.

Here’s where FeedBlendr stands-out from Google Reader.

  • Offers an Atom 1.0 feed (Google is still using Atom 0.3)
  • Offers an RSS 2.0 feed (Google does not support RSS)
  • Offers an HTML page
  • Offers a Mobile page
  • Offers an OPML
  • Offers an API for Geeks out there

And another reason why FeedBlendr stands-out, it doesn’t strip lots of embeds or stuff you have from your original-source feed, especially video embeds from new services like Cozmo.TV and SplashCast. Now that’s a plus for me.

Example:
gameshogun.ws Blognet HTML Page.

The only disadvantage is, there is no way for you to add or delete a Feed from your FeedBlendr instance, “not now” if I understood correctly the posts by the developer.

But this is something that is not that important, unless you open up a new blog every now and then, it is a feature that we can ignore. Given that you need it, then I recommend using Google Reader, as Google allows you to add and delete subscriptions from your folder/tag without the need to produce a new URL.

Back to FeedBlendr, just add your Blendr Feed to FeedBurner and start telling your readers about your new AllBlog Feed.

Here are the examples for gameshogun.ws’ AllBlog feeds (and as of the time of this writing, Google Reader strips off the video embed of Cozmo.TV and SplashCast):

FeedBlendr via FeedBurner – gameshogun.Blognet AllBlog Feed
Google Reader via FeedBurner – FeedMeNow


Google Reader result:

FeedBlendr result:

* Take note, as tested, FeedBurner shows Cozmo.TV and SplashCast from FeedBlendr version and not from the Google Reader version. This simply shows us that Google Reader is the one stripping new video services from showing up, not FeedBurner, not your own-feed.

Conclusion:
I love Google Reader, I’m a fan of Google, but when it comes to creating an “AllBlog” Feed, the winner is FeedBlendr, hands-down. Now let us also consider that Google is concerned with the security of their customers, hence the stripping of stuff that they do not recognize. But I am not saying FeedBlendr isn’t concern with our security even.

Whatever is Google’s reason for doing those stripping, it is something that makes Google Reader the lesser choice. If Google Reader isn’t doing that, I will choose Google Reader over FeedBlendr, after all, I just want an “AllBlog Feed” for my readers like YOU. And FeedBlendr offers that feature very well.

If I want a feed reader, of course we can not compare Google Reader and FeedBlendr, I’d rather compare Google Reader and FeedReader 3.0.

But that’s for another day.


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