Move Your Genealogy Blog Into the 21st Century With Site Feeds

The Society of Genealogists in the UK has finally added a feed to their website. They join a growing rank of family history, genealogical societies, clubs, groups, and services finally getting onto the feed band wagon.

Some of the most valuable online resources to history researchers still do not offer feeds, such as the US National Archives or most pages and resources on Ancestry.com, which limits access, use, and makes it difficult to keep track of new events, activities, resources, and news.

Feed technology has been around for several years and is one of the fastest growing methods of communication and sharing on the web. If your site doesn’t offer feeds, you are losing readers.

For those who monitor the many websites and blogs most family history and genealogy researchers do, visiting each site individually is a nightmare and time waster. Feeds are XML files from a website or blog containing the latest new information on the site in chronological order. These are read through many different feed readers such as Firefox’s Sage Feed Reader, Google Reader, or one of the many web-based feed readers.

Site and blog feeds feature the most recent posts by title, excerpt or full content, allowing your eye to skim across a single page to find out which websites you monitor have new information. Click on the title or link and it will take you directly to the newly updated information to get the full story, if you want.

While many family history and genealogy sites and blogs still have a long way to go visually and structurally, adding feeds is one of the best things you can do to help spread the word about what you have to offer.

If your website host, software, or blogging program does not offer feeds, you can create and add your own through one of the many feed creation services online.

For more information, see:

• Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!
• Benefits and Uses of Website Feeds
• Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds
• Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress
• The Birth of RSS
• Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog
• Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets
• Create RSS Feeds on Any Web Page
• Using Your Feeds for Story Ideas
• Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience
• WordPress Plugins for Feeds
• Yahoo! Pipes: Better Feed Mixer
• Monitoring Your Blog’s Topics and Industry
• Creating Custom Feeds For Sites Without Feeds
• Truths and Consequences of Blogs That Stand Out

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