Keeping Up With Digital Worlds

One of the reasons I wanted to write Digital Worlds using a blog was to explore some of the various ways that the the content of the blog could be consumed.

If you the same websites day after day, Digital Worlds among, haven’t you ever wondered whether there’s an easier way? Well, for many websites there is, and it often starts with an icon like this, either on the web page itself, or by appearing at the side of the browser address bar:

Icon’s like this – “RSS feed icons” – typically link to a version of the web page that can be read – or consumed – in other websites, or displayed on other web pages. How? Watch this…

To view an RSS feed, you can subscribe to it using an online feed reader, such as Bloglines or Google Reader, display it on a “webtop” (web desktop) like Pageflakes or Netvibes, or read it directly through your browser (most browsers will now allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed, but I find Flock to work the best:-)

(For a quick video tutorial on Pageflakes, check out the Pageflakes tutorial on Youtube. For a quick video tutorial on Bloglines, check out the Bloglines tutorial on Youtube.)

There are many web feeds available from the Digital Worlds blog:

• The full feed:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/feed
• Game maker only posts:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/game-maker/feed
• Game Maker free posts:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/GM-free/feed
• Friday Fun posts:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/friday-fun/feed

You may have noticed that each post is associated with a particular category, and one or more tags. Each of these has its own feed.

For example, here are some tag based feeds for some of the Game Maker posts.

• Catch the Clown game posts:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/tag/clowngame/feed
• Maze game posts:
  https://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/tag/mazegame/feed

To show you how these feeds can be used to provide different views over the content from the Digital Worlds blog, I have put together two example Pageflakes pages:

• Digital Worlds Overall View on Pageflakes
• Digital Worlds Game maker posts on Pageflakes

Event the comments for each post have feeds (as you can see on the Game Maker Pageflakes page.)



(You can read about the rationale behind the two views over on my other blog: Disaggregating the Notion of PLEs #1 – PCVs: Personal (Portable?) Content Views.)

So – if you find yourself visiting the same old, same old web pages, day in and day out, never sure whether there will be new content there or not, why not subscribe to them instead, and have the content delivered from multiple websites to you, all in one place, via an RSS feed subscription? :-)

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