RSS Feed

Premium members have the option to enable an RSS feed of their blog. RSS is a standard format for exchanging information between systems.

RSS is often used by visitors to keep track of updates to your blog. Applications, such as modern browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, have RSS readers built into them, allowing visitors to "subscribe" to your feed and see the latest posts in their browser favorites list.

RSS feeds are also utilized by machines (i.e. web search engines) or other websites (like Facebook) to include content from SailBlogs and link back to the main blog page.

Can RSS be used to notify friends and family by email when I add a new blog post?

Yes. However, this is not a function/feature of SailBlogs directly. There are many third-party sites out there that can facilitate this task for your visitors. We recommend Google Reader or RSSFWD as tools that your visitors can use to set up email notifications. All the user has to do is place the URL of your blog into their system and RSSFWD will monitor the RSS feed and send out a notification when the blog is updated.

GeoRSS and Geospacial Data

The SailBlogs RSS feeds, because there is often a direct correlation between content and location, are geographically encoded (commonly known as GeoRSS or Geotagging). If you post a position along with a blog post, the coordinates of that post are included in the RSS feed entry for that item. This change enables outside sites that follow SailBlogs via the RSS feeds to show a corresponding map with latest blog entries or a search engine to find your blog or a specific post based on relevant latitude/longitude.

Update Facebook with your recent posts

Your RSS feed can provide a mechanism to show your recent SailBlogs posts in your profile automatically. See the Connecting SailBlogs to Facebook article for full details.