Wednesday, February 28, 2007

It Shouldn't Be So Difficult!

Yesterday we decided it would be nice to have a place on XCurmudgeon where a reader can sign up for alerts when we've added a new post.

We figured it wouldn't be too difficult. Sure enough, we quickly found a website called Blog Alert that let's you do this.

The sign up was a simple two-step process. The only complication was that it asked us to "type in your feed URL." A note added: "This should NOT be the URL of the blog, it should be the URL of the blog's RSS feed."

Okay, so how hard could it be to figure out the "feed URL," we thought?

Turns out it's not easy. Numerous searches of Blogger Help and broader searches on Google revealed a lot of technical jargon about RSS feeds, etc., but nothing on the seemingly simple task of figuring out the feed URL for your own blog. Eventually, we found a website where you could type in your blog URL and it would supposedly reveal the feed URL, but the program didn't work.

In the end, we took an educated guess. If you sign up for the alert and nothing happens, then our guess was wrong. We hope to get everything straightened out shortly.

But really, why can't Blogger have a simple solution to this?

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