I'm at the point where I'm actively annoyed at all websites without RSS feeds. What, you expect me to actually remember to go and visit your site? Feedreaders are a great way to manage the information stream, and hence part of my overall Getting Things Done system.

I've been using Watch That Page as a service to ping me every time a site changes. It's a great service. However, what I really want is for it to notify me via RSS instead of email. The main advantages of getting the ping via RSS are: 1) it doesn't clog my email inbox, and 2) I can read a number of pings asynchronously -- that is, I can choose to read all the items in a particular feed at one swoop, even if it's a month's worth of stuff. (There are commercial services that will do this but I'm cheap.)

Since I'm a Bloglines user, there's a way to do this! (There might be a similar hack in other feedreaders; anyone out there using another reader who can tell me?)

1) Go to "Extras" (lower left corner) and hit "Create Email Subscriptions"
2) Name the Subscription with the name of the site you want to track. Copy the email address (it will be yourusername.lotsofnumbers@bloglines.com)
3) Go to Watch That Page and set up a new account using that email address.
4) Add the URL of the site you want to track.

Voila! Web site --> Watch That Page --> Email --> Bloglines

You could also set it up so that your RSS feed "watches" more than one site. For instance, you could make a "Friend's pages" list and add all your friend's sites that don't (yet) have feeds.

Hope this proves useful!

M E-L posted this on November 03, 2005
It is filed under Computers & Internet

It is also indexed with the following tags: RSS | Hacks | GTD | Productivity | How To | Organization | Bloglines |