Navigation in SDN Blogs

[Jelena]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't quite get how are we supposed to navigate the SDN blog entries... For example, I found this blog post through search:

It says "part 1" - great, now I would like to read other parts. But I don't see any navigation buttons that would point me to the previous/next entry in the same blog... This is a standard feature on any other respectable blog site. Sure, I can click on the author's name and then look through all of this posts, but why does it have to be that complicated?

Also (again, could be just me) when I click on 'Subscribe", it wants to download some file on my PC (I have MS IE 7) and my security software goes crazy. What's up with that? Why is it working differently than RSS feed on the forum posts?

[marilyn_pratt]

Thanks Jelena for your feedback. You are absolutely correct that newsfeeds should be consistent and easy. At present the blog subscriptions are very different from the forum subscriptions as these are two separate collaboration tools we are using within our framework and different ways and versions of gathering info (one uses RSS 1.0 and the other RSS 2.0, for example).

But even within the blogs there are different methods to subscribe. For example, going to the topics and clicking on the link RSS Feeds for Weblogs on ABAP will use http://feeds.feedburner.com/SDNWeblogs_Abap and through feedburner take you to a page to subscribe, but clicking on the RSS 1.0 icon or the Subscribe icon at the level of author or individual blog pages will bring you those annoying pop ups and send your security wild as you described.

But the problem is more complex. The links also trigger different behavior in different browsers.

If you are in ie7 instead of clicking on the RSS icon in the blog editor you should right mouse click the icon and choose copy shortcut. You can then use this shortcut in your feedreader.

This right click is unnecessary in Firefox where the click on the RSS icon brings you automatically to a screen for subscription with no need to copy the link manually.

I'm a newbie (n00b) with all of this myself, and if grannimari can master this, anyone can

I have a feeling though that you will be seeing more consistency in the way we work with news readers and feed subscriptions as we go forward and your feedback is of course our paramount interest.

Hope the tip of the right mouse is helpful.

I found this helpful [link|http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.php#what] with the following quote:

 There is no agreed-upon standard for how to subscribe to an RSS feed, although some developers are working on this. So there are roughly two ways to subscribe. One is to enter the URL of the RSS feed into your aggregator. The other is to follow a subscribe link from a web page; the problem with this is that practically every aggregator has a different way of doing this. So you might see links labeled as subscribe with Bloglines or add to My Yahoo!. Two services exist to deal with this problem: Syndication Subscription Service and quickSub, which was inspired by the former. Links labeled as  will take you to a page on the Syndication Subscription Service which itself contains direct links to subscribing using various aggregators. QuickSub is similar. Links to RSS feeds using the quickSub tool will popup a list of links to subscribing with various aggregators.  

[pokrakam]

Regarding the blogs: no it's not just you. The 'Part 1' is not really a technical thing. It's just something written into the blog. The easiest is to search for more blogs by the same author or similar title.

Sometimes bloggers add links to earlier blogs when they write a followup, however it would be nice if they would edit earlier ones to point to the newer one as well. You can always add a comment asking them to do this.

Cheers,

Mike

[marilyn_pratt]

Because the blogs here are a bit different than on other websites where you have totally separate blog for each blogger, you can think of the SDN and BPX blogs as being just one humongous blog with separate author pages. We don't have anything but a manual way to resolve this (putting forward and backward links in entries if you are writing a series for example). Others are working this out by using wikiprofiles and linking to their own contents on wiki pages. At present, in the absence of an automated "next", the best thing to do is to look at an aggregation by an author and subscribe to an author's entries. I've tried to explain how to do that with the RSS links below.

Marilyn

[Jelena]

Marilyn,

Thanks for information! This definitely explains a lot. I'll try the righ-click trick, hopefully it will work.

Jelena