Hi everyone! Long time no see...
I don't feel like whining about work right now, so let's try to do something potentially more productive. For a long time, I have been unable to find a way of using the tags attached to each of my blog post to customize the RSS or Atom feeds that people can subscribe too. Why does it matter, you say? It matters because some of you might be interested in my pictures only, while others don't care about my pictures but want to read everything I have to say about politics, religion or education, for example. If you subscribe to the general RSS/Atom feed for this blog, you'll get everything. Of course, I could have one blog per topic, but that it not the way to go as it would make managing my entries a complete nightmare. And what if I have a picture of me with George W. Bush and the Dalai Lama? In which blog should I post that entry? In "pictures", "politics", "religion", or in something else?
Tags solve this problem as you can attach several tags to each entry and have only one place for all of your writings. When you come to my blog, you can navigate the tags by using the links in the "Labels" section of the sidebar (on the right). However, if tags (or "labels") could be used in conjunction with RSS technology, then each user could get updates on precisely what they want without having to deal with all the extra stuff that I will be putting here. The absence of such a feature has been the big thing discouraging me from updating very regularly. I think I might have found a workaround though, so I'll give it a shot and see whether it works or not.
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I'm back after some testing... It seems that blogger.com is not quite as sophisticated as I thought (as of now). There seem to be no way of restricting a search using both a specific url (i.e. a website's address) and a specific label. I am sure that the search company won't let such a sad state of affair last too long, but I'll submit the idea to blogger's blog just in case. If anyone knows of a method to do that, I would greatly appreciate if you could let me know.
In the meantime, I think I will add tags at the end of my entries in the following way: "tag:picture", "tag:technology", "tag:Apple", etc. It will allow me to create, for example, a customized RSS feed for all of my blog entries that are related to "Apple, Inc." and to leave out of the feed entries that talk about "apples" (i.e. the fruit, not the company). I'm pretty sure Google will add labels as a search option soon enough, but I'd rather use something that works now. I'm tired of waiting. I'm aching for some action!!!
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Follow-up: It seems the next step will be to determine which tags I want to use.
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