In previous posts I talked about Inoreader HTML export for folders and tags, and also how to embedding Inoreader HTML in other webspaces like websites and the LMS. In this post, I want to talk about another one of the ways you can export folders and tags, and that is with its own RSS feed.
First of all: why would this be useful? Here are just three possibilities:
Share your curated content. Exporting by RSS is a way to share curated content (tags you've created, folders you've created) with others who are interested in that topic. (If you use Twitter, it would be similar to someone subscribing to one of your Twitter lists.)
RSS in your class webspace. Another way this could be useful is if you have some kind of RSS subscription feature in your LMS or other course portal. You could create a course-related tag and use that tag to send all kinds of content to your LMS via that RSS feature. (I honestly don't know if any LMSes have features like that... but they should!)
Students subscribing to course content. Finally, if you teach your students about RSS and encourage them to learn how to use an RSS reader (Feedly is great for students, for example; more user-friendly for beginners than Inoreader), the RSS export feature makes it easy for them to subscribe to the class blog network and/or to specific assignments or other class-related content in their own feed reader.
How to export folders and tags as RSS
You already know how to do this! RSS is just another one of those export options that you see after you turn on the export for a folder or for a tag. Just click on a Folder, then click on View Folder Information (using the little down arrow next to the folder name in the top navigation bar to open the options); you'll then see the RSS link among the export options:
Here's the URL for the RSS feed that you will then see:
So, for example, I could share that link with students, and they could subscribe to it in Feedly or in Inoreader. Here's what that looks like in Inoreader, for example; as you can see, the difference is that instead of seeing the individual feeds in a folder, the person just sees one continuous stream of content because this is just one feed that they have subscribed to:
And you can use that same RSS feed to subscribe with Feedly:
What's very cool and convenient is that this RSS feed reflects the contents of my folder dynamically. As I add new blogs to my folder, the content of those blogs will go into the feed. The subscriber doesn't have to do anything differently; all the contents of all the feeds in my folder will appear via the RSS export.
Next up: I'll explain about Export with OPML which is a way to export the actual feeds in a package, as opposed to the consolidated content stream as RSS.
