Tag Archives: RSS

How MEPs should organise their web comms and social networking

I was a speaker yesterday at the Nordic-Baltic Youth Forum 2011 in Narva, Estonia. The slides from my presentation are here, but this post is about an issue that was on my mind all day – how Members of the European Parliament should organise their web presence. The 3 MEPs at the event in Narva - Emilie Turunen, Kristiina Ojuland and Radvilė Morkūnaitė-Mikulėnienė – all have personal websites and some presence on social media, but judging by their comments on the panels they struggle to make the most of the technology, and find it hard to work out what they should do and what their staff should do. So here’s a plan for them.

Click to enlarge
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New blog design – a work in progress

As you can see I’ve had a bit of a clean up around here…

The blog design is now much whiter and simpler, with a clearer emphasis on the content of the blog posts. Because I needed a swift solution I’ve based the design on the excellent Wu Wei theme by Jeff Ngan. Not only is the typography of this theme neat, but it also is a very easy theme to customise if you know some HTML – no complicated functions.php files. The site is of course running with WordPress still.

One of the main reasons for the upgrade was the incompatibility of my old theme with Topsy, Sociable and other equivalent plugins to share content on various social networks. Those buttons have now been added – question now is whether anyone is going to use them!

Secondly I’ve been meaning to reorganise the content here for some time, reflecting the changing focus of my work and my interests. The blog now has only 4 categories – EUPolitics, UKPolitics, techPolitics and notPolitics. The first three of these are rather self explanatory, and all my other musings will end up in ‘notPolitics’. There’s a link to each of these in the top menu, and RSS feeds for each (and for combinations of the categories) can be found here.

A few things need to be tidied up still (the footer for sure), and the site hasn’t been tested in IE at all yet, so it’s very much a work in progress. But better to make a start I reasoned!

Photo: Jo Peattie “wash and brush up” March 10, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
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RSS: the biggest time-saver on the web

Netvibes screenshot - click to enlarge

Netvibes screenshot - click to enlarge

I ran a workshop on online campaigning in Brussels last night, and in the initial round of introductions I asked the participants if they blogged, were on Facebook, on Twitter, or used RSS. A couple of people said they ‘didn’t have time for RSS‘. I was flabbergasted. How do you have time if you don’t use RSS?

So hence this blog entry aims to set things straight about this brilliant technology that’s promoted by no-one and hence does not get the credit it deserves.

Essentially if you use the internet to get your news in the regular way, visiting different websites in turn, you’re not time efficient. Pages take a while to load, you have to browse around for the sections you want to read. Even if you have sites open in multiple tabs in a browser you still have little overview to compare sources. So in short you waste time.

RSS solves all of that, by grouping together the content you want, in the way you want it, and – subtly – keeping it up to date.

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How to follow Facebook Groups in Netvibes (or whatever other feed reader)

A friend working for a Swedish NGO asked me whether it would be possible to keep an eye on Facebook Groups from within a Netvibes Universe. Seems like a good idea as going to each group in turn to see what’s being discussed is a bit of a headache. But how are you supposed to do that when there is no RSS feed for a Facebook Group?

The solution is to use a Yahoo Pipes page developed by Jason Silver to create a RSS from the Facebook API. You just need the Group ID for the Facebook Group. So, for example, the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bus Campaign group has the URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=84944630850 This means the Group ID is 84944630850. Stick that in the Yahoo Pipes page, and you get a screen that looks like this:

rss

Right click ‘Get as RSS’ and you then have the address for your RSS feed. You can then add this in Netvibes as you would for any other feed. The same would of course work with whatever other RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) although Netvibes is my personal reader of choice.

So what are the limitations? The RSS feed only gives you information about the Discussion Board posts in the Facebook Group. It does not give you RSS of the wall.

Please do let me know your experiences managing to get this to work!

(Oh, and while I’m at it on interesting uses of Netvibes: keep an eye on the status of your servers in Netvibes via a free RSS feed from Montastic)

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