For instance rather than run a Blog on dogs why not specialize in black labs or some other breed? I guarantee you, if you put a cute picture of a black lab with a red bandana around her neck up, you’ll have all the other black lab owners dropping by to tell stories about their own dogs.
Pinging, is how you tell the entire Blog community as a whole that your Blog site is up and running. Most Blog software has a feature that does this for you when a new post or comment has been made.
To put Blog software on your own server and running it independently on your site, I have found Wordpress to be excellent software and this can be downloaded at http://www.wordpress.org
Chapter 12: Using RSS Feeds for Content
We live in the information age, and there’s just no getting around it. Information and news happens every single day, and savvy site surfers will expect you to update your content regularly. In fact, they’d prefer you to do that daily, or even hourly. And yes—I mean 24/7 hours.
But you gotta sleep, right? And have some time off occasionally. So instead of spending every waking hour relentlessly surfing around from site to site looking for content, wouldn’t you prefer it to be streamed in to your site? Well now you can, thanks to a very clever service, RSS.
RSS works so well that a lot of site owners swear it stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. Why is it simple? Because you just select the content you like and have it delivered directly to your site.
If you’re a busy person—and who isn’t, these days—RSS feeds can take the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by streaming in the very latest information that you are interested in.
So where do you get this good stuff? Well, if it’s news you want, most of the major news sites provide it since it is growing rapidly in popularity. A few news services that provide it are Guardian, New York Times and CNN.
12.1 How do I start using RSS feeds?
Well, the first thing you’re gonna need is a news reader. There are many different versions of these, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want.
My top picks for news readers, listed by the operating system they work with, are:
1. Mac OS X: NetNewsWire This is a simple yet elegant Mac-like aggregator that any one can use, yet it’s powerful.
2. Windows: SharpReader A very simple tool, but it delivers the goods.
3. Linux: Straw The best very aggregator for GNOME.
4. Web: Bloglines Enough said.
Now, after you’ve chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. For example, if you would like the latest BBC News Entertainment stories, simply visit the Entertainment section and you will notice an orange RSS button on the left hand side.
The RSS button typically looks like this example from the BBC (http://www.bbc.com) page:
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