The Tlog - a technology blog

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

If your blog isn’t a personal one, it’s very likely that it has one or more subjects you write about, such as software, fishing, cheese dip… And it’s likely as well that you need to stay current - that is, if your blog is about cheese dip, you want to stay informed about any cheese dip-related news, developments, and such. One way, of course, is by reading other blogs about cheese dip (assuming, of course, there are any…) - sometimes you’ll just link to their articles with a comment or two, sometimes you’ll get an idea for a brilliant new opinion piece about the current state of cheese dip in the world… you get the idea.

And, if you’re smart, you have already subscribed to some blogs about the subject. And I advise you to keep doing so.

However, there’s another way - not to replace the above, but to complement it: search feeds. Instead of subscribing to a blog, you subscribe to the results of a search query, and then, it appears in your feed aggregator as if it was another blog. But it’s not a blog, it’ll have articles from (possibly) every blog in the world. As long as they talk about cheese dip, of course.

Let’s try it now. I’ll use Google Blogsearch, although there are other ways - possibly better ones. If so, please let me know.

1. browse to http://blogsearch.google.com
2. type "cheese dip" (between quotes, to get only references to cheese dip, instead of a page which mentions “cheese” and “dip” unrelated to each other), and click on the button or press Enter
3. after you get the results, switch to “Sort by Date” by clicking on it, on the top right
4. scroll to the bottom of the page. Look, nice Atom and RSS links! Just copy one of them (probably one of the “100 results” links), paste it in your feed aggregator, and there you go. Whatever happens in the world about cheese dip, and is mentioned in any blogs, you’ll know. Life has meaning again.

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Related posts:

1. Chitika eMiniMalls: using search queries for the ads
2. Blogging tips #17: when to start another blog
3. Blogging tips #5: Adding your blog to search engines and directories
4. Blogging tips #10: “No blogger is an island”
5. Coming soon: big list of "blogs about blogging" feeds