Then you need to sign up for my upcoming, free webinar – “Genealogy News at Your Fingertips: From RSS Feeds to Digital Magazine Platforms.” I was honored to be selected to do this webinar as part of the Southern California Genealogical Society’s 2013 Jamboree Extension Series.
The focus of the webinar is to guide you through the myriad of options you have for getting online genealogy news content delivered to you – with a specific emphasis on how to understand and take advantage of RSS feeds — you know, the mystery behind those orange icons you see all over the web.
It has been my experience that they are widely underused and I’d love the opportunity to explain just how great they are. Google’s decision to kill Google Reader this summer helped make more people aware of what an RSS feed is but I think this will be a great opportunity to continue and help people understand them.
The official description for the webinar is below:
RSS feeds are powerful mechanisms for having online content delivered directly to you. With the plethora of genealogy sites available online, the information river can often seem overflowing. In this session, you will learn what RSS feeds are and how they are used, understand why they are beneficial to you as a web consumer and a web publisher, and survey the different types of RSS readers available – including the newest trends of magazine-style content delivery systems for aggregated news. Whether on your desktop or on-the-go, you can make online information work for you!
The presentation will be on Saturday, October 5th at 12pm central time. You can sign up at the SCGS website. It will be archived, but the archive is only available to SCGS members. Hope to *see* you there!
Glad to see you doing a webinar with the So-Cal Gen Soc. Did I help make this happen when I posted that I joined them a year ago??
Hi Kari – thx for the comment! I’ve been familiar w/ SCGS for awhile now and listened in to many of the webinars in their 2012 Jamboree Extension series. I was invited to submit a presentation idea so I did and was accepted. yeah! 🙂 I still haven’t become a member myself, though I should!
I don’t even know what RSS is
Then you should definitely sign up! 🙂
Taneya, the webinar was great. You had mentioned at the Q&A session that you might write up some more of the information you shared, such as the URLs that were in the presentation, and tips about how to find feeds in different websites (those created with WordPress, Blogger, etc). I’ve not been successful in getting addons for Firefox and Chrome since I don’t know what addons you recommended. Your demo showed that you clicked a star in Firefox, but does this only work for “Live Bookmarks”? I tried “RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)” for Chrome, but could not figure out how to add “TheOldReader” feed reader to the extension’s options. I also could not figure out the Facebook tip where you can add the “see what others posted” section (not sure where to replace “numeric_ID” with page ID). And for Google alerts, I could not figure out from the screenshot in your webinar how to set it up. Can RSS feeds be added to Google Sites? I’ve not been able to find the answer to that either. Further tips would be appreciated. Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback! You’ve got some great questions and I will email you.