Back in May 2006, I have started my blog using the Blogger platform and one month later moved it to my own website using WordPress. Couple month later, I joined Pythian and, since then, the vast majority of my blogging activities has been on the Pythian Group Blog.
The Pythian blog has grown significantly since then and many more excellent authors started blogging there. While the Pythian blog was mostly focused on Oracle database just a couple years ago, it’s has got very broad coverage now and is including MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle databases as well as Oracle Application Server, Oracle eBusiness Suite and other enterprise software. While I think this is a great opportunity to entend your area of interests, it might be just too much for some as few people already complained and unsubscribed to avoid being overwhelmed with information. That was painful to hear!
First of all, I should say that there is a way to subscribe only to a selected category or a single author — just add /feed/ at the end of pretty much any page. For example, all my blog posts can be seen using URL https://blog.pythian.coms/author/alex and RSS feed URL would be https://blog.pythian.coms/author/alex/feed/. Likewise, the Oracle category RSS feed is https://blog.pythian.coms/category/oracle/feed/.
For my personal RSS feed I have come up with another alternative that let me also keep my personal web site more up to date — I’ve setup an aggregation of my blog posts from the Pythian Group Blog to my personal web site at www.oracloid.com. If I happen to blog at any other places like the BAAG Party web site, my posts can be aggregated and subscribed using a single feed on my personal web site. The feed has the direct links to the source blog posts so you are sent directly to the source blog from your RSS reader so no additional hops involved. The comments on the aggregated posts are disabled and only the fragments are posted in the syndicated post linking to the source for the full version and commenting. This way all readers end up on the source blog anyway.
I should mention that I had to “break” my personal blog feed during that process so that the subscribers of my blog are not spammed with 2 years of my old Pythian posts. Some of you might have noticed that. I had to write couple two-liner WordPress plug-ins to assist in this process — I should post them one day in case someone else finds them useful as well.
What does it mean to you? If you have this message in your RSS feed then, probably, nothing.
- You are subscribed to the Pythian Group Blog — stay this way and chances are you won’t miss any of my blog posts and will keep getting other good stuff from our blog.
- You are subscribed to my personal Pythian blog feed — stay this way or re-subscribe to my aggregated feed.
- You are subscribed to my personal website feed — stay this way or consider subscribing to the Pythian blog feed instead for more great stuff.
- You are subscribed to the Pythian Group feed and my personal feed so you’ve got this message twice — unsubscribe from my personal feed and keep Pythian blog in your RSS reader; this will avoid duplicate messages.
- You are subscribed to my personal feed on the Pythian blog and my personal web site so you’ve got this message twice — unsubscribe from my personal Pythian feed to avoid duplicates.
That’s it folks. Thanks for reading!
No comments