RSS Feeds by Label

Many of us on the left, either as individuals or on behalf of organizations, have tried our hand at blogging. For myself, as someone who maintains several websites, a longtime frustration has been that the energy i am putting into the blog does not automatically get integrated into what else i’m doing. Unless i actually copy-paste a posting from Sketchy Thoughts, it won’t show up on Kersplebedeb or anywhere else.

i’ve known about RSS feeds for a while, but they have had the disadvantage of being indiscriminate – i may want all of my posts about killer cops to show up on my Police & Justice page, but i may not want to clutter that page with all of my posts about translation.

This has been bugging me for some time, and i have searched on the internet for answers, but until a few days ago it was all to no avail. And then by luck, i came across it, a post on Blogger Buster from two years ago telling me exactly what to do.

It seems the blogger RSS feed does exist divvied out by label, and this is what it looks like:

http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[yourblogID]/posts/[feedType]/-/[labelName]

[yourblogID] is a number that you will see in the URL bar whenever you click on anything in your blogger dashboard, right at the end it will say “blogID=” and then you’ll have this big number – that’s it! (mine is 17300290)

[feedType] i would want to leave as posts to give links back to my actual posts

[label] is the name of your label, with spaces replaced by %20

So my RSS feed just to my posts about “book reviews” would be:

http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/17300290/posts/summary/-/book%20review

This feed can then be placed, via blogger, on your sidebar, just as i have placed the feeds to various other blogs i like.

Of course, to integrate it into a webpage there’s a few things that need to be done, involving php. While i’m learning to do this myself i don’t want to try and explain it lest i make a mistake, but on my site what i am using is MagpieRSS, which you can download here – a tutorial on how to install/use it can be found here.

i’m very new to this myself, and will try to post more ideas as i come across them – in the meantime, i think this aspect of blogger feeds could prove particularly useful for myself, and maybe for you too.