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Setting up a daily feed of ballet news

By Sheri Candler

It has only been within the last 3 months that I have regularly started reading blogs devoted to ballet and dance having left that world on a daily basis some time ago. I was shocked to find that there are so many! And such activity on Twitter as well using the hashtag #ballet. People share the greatest stories, photos, news and videos on these tools, but maybe some of you don’t know how to use them so I will explain RSS feeds. I will move into Twitter and Facebook at a later date.

I was inspired to write this post by the wonderful Nichelle Strzepek over at Dance Advantage who explained how one could set up their own ballet news “magazine” with all of the latest stories without having their email inbox cluttered with newsletters. This works especially well if Google is your main search engine. Her post is from a few years ago and Google has redesigned their layout since then. Here is the most current news.

RSS feeds are a way for publications or bloggers to easily share what they write by distributing it through whatever online method you choose to read it. You can purposely choose to have it delivered via email, but for this post we’ll focus on keeping the feed in an online location.

1)Note the website address or URL of the RSS feed you wish to subscribe to.

If you click on the RSS link image

you will go to a page with a lot of data on it. Copy the URL from the Address field of your browser to the clipboard, as this is what you will use to identify the publication you wish to subscribe to. An example would be www.joffreymovie.com/feed

2)Set Up a Google Personalized Homepage if you don’t already have one, or log in to yours if you do.

3)Click on the gear icon in the right corner of the page, and pull down the menu. Find iGoogle. A list of content options to add to your homepage should appear.

4)Click on the Add Gadgets button on the upper left hand side.

5)Scroll to the bottom of that page and find where it says Add feed or gadget and click

6)Fill in the URL box of the site feed you want to keep track of and it will tell you if it is accepted.

7)Go back to the iGoogle homepage, which you can set as your default page any time you access Google, and you will see a box with latest 3 posts from that blog or site you just added. This gives you a quick scan on what is happening with your favorite sites without having to bookmark them and remembering to check in regularly. As you fill the page with more and more sites, you can rearrange the information boxes in order of personal priority by scrolling over the box until it gives an all arrows symbol and then click and drag the box into position.

If using Google Reader is more to your liking, you can add feeds right to that section of your Google account. It is accessible when you want to read it by pulling down the menu on your Gmail account or Google Plus account under the word More. Adding a feed to Google Reader requires subscribing to the blog in question. Here’s how to add a subscription to Google Reader, even if the blog in question does not feature an orange “subscribe” button.

1)Go to the Google homepage and choose the word More in the upper page navigation and scroll down to the word Reader

2)Click the red box that says Subscribe and a URL box pops up. Enter in the URL you want to subscribe to. You don’t even have to type in the word “feed” at the end of the URL. If you need to look it up, simply open a new tab by clicking the + sign in the upper right of the screen and then type in a search term to find the site you need. Right click the URL box and choose Copy to copy the URL address and then go back to the Reader tab you left open and right click again and choose Paste and paste it into the URL box and click Add.

3)The feed will automatically pop up in your Google Reader page. You can rearrange subscriptions listed in the left column by clicking on the name and dragging them into position.

If the blog you want to add does have the orange RSS box, click that on the site and choose Google Reader option from the list that comes up as you preferred location.

Here is a list of some blogs you may want to check out