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

By Lorelle VanFossen
Categories: Genealogy Techniques

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:

Article Information

Move Your Genealogy Blog Into the 21st Century With Site Feeds is Issue Number 310 published March 20, 2007, by Lorelle VanFossen. This is just one of many articles found in the Genealogy Techniques categories. Lorelle VanFossen writes for a variety of blogs, websites, ezines, and print publications. She also teaches and does a lot of public speaking internationally on photography, writing, blogging, web page design and development, and more. She and her husband and cat(s) travel full-time across North American and the rest of the world by RV, planes, trains, automobiles, and foot, writing and photographing their travels and nature, when they can find it. Lorelle VanFossen has written 231 articles for our our family history blog.

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8 Responses to “Move Your Genealogy Blog Into the 21st Century With Site Feeds”

  1. Bill Ives Says:
    March 21st, 2007 at 5:38 am

    Thanks for this helpful post. I use Feedburner as my feed provider. The basic service is free and it gives you some excellent statistics on your subscribers. I then use BlogBridge as my RSS reader. It is also free and allows you to divide your feed subscriptions into “guides” which are groupings around a common topic. This helps organize your subscriptions. I am surprised that some of the well known sites you mention still do not have RSS. Bill Ives

  2. Dave Says:
    May 6th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

    Where are the best places/sites/directories to get your feeds available to the target audience of those interested in genealogy? Thanks for the helpful article–just started my new blog about how to start or run a family association, http://familypulse.blogspot.com, and this will be great.

  3. Lorelle VanFossen Says:
    May 8th, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    I don’t understand. Where can you find feeds to help find things to write about or how to promote your feed to others?

    Using a search engine, you can find tons of genealogy sites and information, and some of these have feeds you can add to your feed reader to track their information.

    To promote your feed, make it clear on your site and test it to make sure it works. Recommend it to everyone you talk to and on your blog. Google and other search engines and directories will find your feed without you doing any work. It’s not like the old days where you have to “promote” and “submit” your site or feed anywhere. Pings and other services do the job for you behind the scenes, if you are using blogging software enabled to do such things.

  4. houston limousine Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 9:25 am

    Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks

  5. Robert Says:
    May 6th, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again - taking you feeds also, Thanks.

  6. Dave Says:
    October 5th, 2009 at 5:36 pm

    Thanks for the awesome post, it helped me out a lot.

  7. Andrew Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 8:48 am

    Hi,
    Have you ever tried http://www.LocateFamily.com ? You can browse through over 700,000 family names and over 25 million individuals to find people from all religions, ethnic backgrounds, classes and origins from around the globe. Try it… it’s completely FREE!
    Andrew

  8. travel safety Says:
    January 10th, 2010 at 2:53 am

    I spent 4 hours reading your site. Thanks for the good information. I’ll be back!

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