Feedly Tags and Follow Buttons

I've written a number of educational posts on these issues.

Click here to see each of them.

First - a quick sidetrack - if you are still trying to decide between bloglovin' and feedly - I found this article called "Bloglovin' vs Feedly: Which RSS Reader Reigns Supreme?'  It's a great article that does a good job pointing out the pros and cons of each!


I have two quick updates regarding feedly for you - both are kind of more for the advanced user!


TAGGING IN FEEDLY
Feedly is getting ready to disconnect from Google Reader.  Right now, they are just a front-end to Google Reader so they are using Google Reader info.  When they disconnect, they are not only going to keep all of the blogs that you read, they are also going to bring over everything you have tagged in the past!!!!  Yeah!!!

But...they do need a little help.

Tagging is a great function that allows you to mark and then keep past posts.  For example, I might tag "Christmas" or "CASE-worthy".  Those posts are automatically saved and categorized until the point that you choose to un-tag them.

What feedly needs you to do is to tell your feedly account what tags you used when you were reading in Google Reader.  If you don't remember, pop back into Google Reader (although Google has already taken away the link - just go to www.google.com/reader) and find them.  They are listed on the left column, toward the bottom with little tag symbols.

Then go into feedly,

1. Click on "prefs" right under your name and scroll down until you see "tagging"
2. Type your list of tags into the box using commas to separate each tag.

Done!!

The exact wording with a helpful picture from the feedly blog is...

But we need your help regarding upgrading your tagged articles. We need you to go to your feedly preferences and enter the list of tags you have been using to archive old articles. We will migrate up to 250 articles per tag.

This is what my tag list looks like for example:

A FEEDLY FOLLOW BUTTON

Sadly, one thing that is lacking right now is a feedly follow button so that the people who read in feedly and want to add you can easily just click.

(Not that it's all that hard to simply copy your blog address and paste it into feedly - but buttons are nice!)

It is fairly high on feedly's update list - but if you want to add one now, I read about a way to do it.  It's not totally clean - so you might want to wait until feedly has an official button.  If you do create your own - I promise to tell you when feedly has an official button!

• Find a feedly graphic - I just did a Google Image search and came up with this one.  If you like it just save this one to your computer.

• Find your blog feed address.  (I only know how to do this for blogger).  It's your blog address plus the following "/feeds/posts/default"  For example, my blog feed address is:

                         http://joyfulcreationswithkim.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

• Go to your blogger/design/layout area and "Add a gadget" to your sidebar, using an "Image" gadget.

• Add a title.  I just said "For my feedly followers"
• Add a caption.  The one flaw in this is that it actually just brings up your blog in feedly - it doesn't add it until the click the Add button in feedly.  So I just captioned it "Then click +ADD in feedly!!"
• Add a link.  You need to type http://www.feedly.com/home#subscriptions/feed/your feed address.  For example, I typed:

                  http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/http://joyfulcreationswithkim.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

  

• Add the image.  Browse your computer for the feedly graphic that you found or copied from above.
• Save

I have re-organized my sidebar so that all of these major readers are listed.  My sidebar says:

     If you follow/read in blogger/blogspot
          This is the old "follow" button that we all already have.

     If you read in bloglovin'
           They already have a nice button.
           Just sign up for bloglovin' and find the follow buttons.
           (I don't use bloglovin', but I did sign up to get the button.)

     If you read in feedly
           I created it as above

     If you read via email
           Most of us already have it there.

I think I've covered the big ones this way!!

Hasn't this all been just a big adventure??  Not really one that I welcomed - but I have learned a lot!!