Getting the Hang of RSS

One of the blogs that I get an RSS feed for is Diva Marketing.  I like it a lot. As I was quickly scanning what the Diva has been writing about this week, I saw an entry that caught my eye, Feed Your Blog to The Shark. The Diva was passing along information about a tool that submits your blogs RSS feed to about twenty different services.

Since RSS has been top of mind this week, I was more than eager to go to Feed Shark and find out what it was all about.

I started submitting my blog to the various RSS feed services. After submitting my blog to two or three services, I got to one that wanted the URL for my RSS feed instead of the URL for my blog.

I do not have the URL for my RSS committed to memory.  So I went to the help section of Typepad to find it.

This is how the help manual described how I would create the URL

The RSS feed for the weblog is located:

http://example.typepad.com/blog/index.rdf

Now, I ask you. Are those instructions clear and understandable? Maybe to the technically gifted that explanation explains exactly what you are supposed to do.

But, to those of us who are technically challenged, that explanation is a pain. I had to do too much guessing. Did example mean the name of my blog? Or is example some RSS lingo that I don't know anything about.

I guessed that I should replace the word "example" with the name of my blog.

But, what about the word "blog" in the URL? That was more problematic. Was that a generic term  that's included in all RSS URLs? Or, was I supposed to replace the word "blog"  with the name of my blog.

Fortuneately I knew if I right clicked on the the icon for my RSS feed that is displayed on my blog, I could check the URL in Properties.

Sure enough, I saw that  I was indeed supposed to substitute the name of my blog for the word "blog."

Now, Typepad could have saved me so much time and fretting if they had just taken into consideration that some of us do better when we see an example.

It could be as simple as saying,

"If your blog is called FunnyBusiness , your RSS URL would be:

http://funnybusiness.typepad.com/funnybusiness/index.rdf

If you have an additional blog on your account that's called Corporately Incorrect, its RSS URL would be:

http://funnybusiness.typepad.com/corporatelyincorrect/index.rdf

Now how hard would that be?