Stephanie Romanski

RSS continues to baffle some folks. I’ll admit to not grasping the concept either once upon a time. But once I did, I never looked back, and so it’s one of my missions to make my coworkers’, friends, relatives’, and anyone else’s lives as easy as possible when it comes to keeping a handle on all of the websites people visit on a daily basis.

So, I made a simple how-to on using Google Reader. Rather than go into what RSS is, anbd how many options there are out there for using it, I picked one, showed how to use it, and called it good. I found explaining everything about RSS put people off.

So, here’s my monkey sheet, and a quick & dirty (and in a noisy newsroom) screencast on using Google Reader and RSS:

The Wonders of RSS

You will need:
A Google account

Directions:

1. Log into your Google/Gmail account (same thing really)
2. Go to: http://reader.google.com/  – This will be your RSS Reader. It will pull new posts and updates from any website feed you add a subscription to. Think of it as like subscribing to a magazine. Keep this page open for now and open a new browser tab or window.
3. Now, you need to populate your reader with feeds. When you visit a website, you might notice an area on it that has a little orange square with some lines on it:    This means it has an RSS feed available to subscribe to.
4. In order to subscribe to a feed, you need it’s URL. Hover your mouse over that funky orange square and you can then right-click, then choose ‘Copy link location’ (on a PC. I dunno what happens on a Mac, but I imagine it’s a similar process.) OR you can just click the funky orange square which takes you to a weird looking version of the website, and then copy the link up in the browser address bar. It’s up to you. Either way, you need that URL.
5. Now, you’ve copied the link, let’s go back to your Google Reader page. Once there, on the left side column, at the top is a link or button called ‘Add a subscription’. Click it.
6. Paste in that URL you copied, and hit ‘Add’. That’s it.

Sometimes it may be hard to find that funky orange square. To know for sure if a website has an RSS feed, Firefox will put that box right up in the address bar. IE puts it next to the ‘Home’ button. Weird. If you don’t see it in either of those spots, then chances are the website does not offer RSS.

The beauty of using Google Reader as your RSS feed reader is that you can open it from any computer (if you are logged in, of course) and have your feeds ready to view.

Basically what the reader does is pull in updates from every subscription you add, then you can read them all in one place, at your leisure and then click to the website easily to comment or view the story there. It’s just such a timesaver and once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you got on without it.

A while back, my coworker and Social Media enthusiast, Mark Coddington, asked me if I’d participate in a little podcast about making things like Twitter work in a small newspaper environment. We finally sat down to record it on December 18th and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. We had some really good discussion about things like making advice from the Big Boys in larger markets work for the little guys like us and how to get around issues with small staffs, how to make the moula, and what has and hasn’t worked for The Independent.

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, have a listen!

Check it out:

Download

Finally, a breaking news event that I don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying the traffic it brings us.

So, Nebraska and surrounding states were hit by a rather large snowstorm this week and because we had some warning it was coming, we planned some awesome online coverage.

I set up a live webcam using Ustream.tv that simply pointed out our front window onto part of downtown Grand Island and called it our SnowCam. It was on before the storm hit, during the storm, and is proving so popular with viewers from around the world (who turned out to be from the area. The farthest away I heard was a local’s daughter in Germany who enjoyed the cam) that I haven’t shut it off yet. To date, we’ve had over 10,000 viewers and UStream kindly featured us on their front page. Woohoo!

We also had a couple of guys who cam and had a little snowball fight in front of the cam. I was forewarned about it (though I still do not know who they were) and so recorded it and it’s now our second most-viewed video (the top viewed video is of a dog. The dog is awesome and deserves the top spot.)

Next we put up the always-awesome Cover it Live window on our front page where we fielded questions about closings, road reports and  fed all of our Twitter streams with photos and video. We opened up the #nestorms tag to allow readers from around the state to feed into the CiL conversation and we kept the chat going all day. We opened it up again the next day (after the storm had passed and the plowing had begun) and Jack Sheard and Scott Kingsley (Our presentation editor and photographer, respectively) jumped in Jack’s 4WD and drove around town sending Twitpics and road reports into the chat so people could get an idea of what had and had not been cleared. They also stumbled onto a backhoe that was engulfed in flames and got some great shots of that.

I solicited reader photos using Posterous (Thanks and props go to the ever-ahead-of-the-curve folks at the Austin-Statesman) and we got a few cool photos there. I also shot some video using my Flip and TwitVid.com of a couple of drives during and after the storm and shared them in the CiL show.

We had a lot of fun and the stats freaks among us gleefully (and guilt-free!) watched as the SnowCam’s viewers steadily climbed, as our Day One Cover it Live show climbed to over 1,600 views and 390 replays (phenomenal for a small paper like us. To put that in perspective, we were over the moon when our Black Friday CiL coverage got 590 view, our best day ever, until now.) and our Day Two show reached over 700 views.

These are the numbers we needed to be able to show our advertisers that our online coverage of stuff is worth sponsoring, and hopefully that will start happening.