Do a lot of your Connections or Friends have blogs?  Do you want to know when they post new articles?  Are you a LinkedIn or Facebook user?  Then read on for an easy way to get updated when someone creates a blog entry!

Want to keep up to date with blogs your Connections or Friends write?  If you're using LinkedIn or Facebook then you're in luck!  Those sites have a built in Blog readers which let you know when any of your connections creates a blog article.  Besides having your own RSS Reader tool, this is a great feature these sites support.

LinkedIn lets you "Add an Application" called Blog Link to do this.

Afterwards you'll see a note from Blog Link saying you've "installed this application" and you can "Update your Settings" to display on your profile and/or display on LinkedIn homepage.  Make your selection and then click Update Settings button.  

That's it!  Now you'll see Blog Link show all of your Connection's blogs (if they've hooked them into LinkedIn that is).  Click on the Home link on the top left and you'll see blogs from your Connections on the bottom right hand side.  (You can now grab the title bar and move it around if you want it higher up on your profile)

The only hiccup with using LinkedIn is I find there's a lag between when a blog is posted on the original site and when it comes up on LinkedIn.  I'm thinking it's cause there is some type of service running on the LinkedIn servers which only runs every hour or two, or once a day or something like that.  Just bear that in mind when your coworker comes running over to you asking if you've read their blog the just posted 30s ago. HAHA  (Ya, I've done that to SG and SB before DOH! LOL).

Naturally, the next question is (or so I think it's naturally the next question LOL) is if you have your own Blog, how would you add it into LinkedIn?  Great question!  Edit your profile, and add "My RSS Feed" to your Websites section.  This is goig to be the RSS feed URL, not the URL to your site which you give out to people or that you punch into IE/Firefox/Safari.  So for example, my entry is http://www.pchenry.com/RSS.aspx.  Try that out in your browser to see what RSS data looks like, it's pretty cool IMHO. LOL

 

Facebook automagically tells you when your Friends add blog entries.  They look just like any other updates.

It suffers from the same lag as LinkedIn, but I do believe the polling time to be shorter on Facebook.  So to read your Friend's blog postings, you don't have to do anything, they're just there.  Nice eh?

As with LinkedIn, with Facebook you still have to tell it about your blog.  To do this.  Edit your profile, look for the Information box on the left hand side of the web page, click on the pencil and select Edit Information.

Next, look for the Contact Information section, expand it, and add in the same RSS URL as you did above with LinkedIn (remember, not the URL you give out to your friends to go check out, you can add that one too, just make sure to add in the RSS one). 

Once you do that, then all your Friends will start seeing your blog posts!  Beautiful eh?

Now that you know how to get updated more frequently from your Connections or Friends, it's time to grab a coffee and get coding!

 

Resources:

RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law: RSS 2.0 Specification

RSS Reader Application: RSS Bandit

RSS Reader (website): News Gator