Category: Wordpress

how to set up an rss feed for arcanesciencelab

whbeebe2 Comments

In the past I’ve been asked how to set up an RSS feed for this blog. I never answered because, I’m embarrassed to admit, I didn’t know how. Until now. The basic answer is to take the URL of this blog and add ‘feed’ to the end of it, thusly:

/feed/

Examples

Inoreader showing my blog’s RSS feed

If you copy this into an iPhone app that tracks RSS feeds, such as Inoreader (see the example above), then you can follow along when I post a new entry. This might be better than getting an email every time I make a post, as it keeps the clutter out of your inbox. Inoreader also has a web page ( https://www.inoreader.com ), so you can follow along in your browser if that’s your wish.

However, Inoreader charges a fee if you want their professional capabilities. If you don’t want to pay anything, and you’d rather follow along on your tablet or personal computer, then I recommend that you install Vivaldi (it’s free) and then click the RSS feed link above, like so:

Vivaldi RSS feed

If you then click the Follow Feed button, you’ll wind up with the following dialog:

I’d suggest that you change the refresh interval to something like every day, or perhaps every week. Once it’s configured, finish the process by clicking Add Feed.

This is what a full blown RSS feed looks like in Vivaldi. What I like about this view is how the entries are down one column, and the far right pane is used to hold the content.

I’m slowly adding entries to my Vivaldi browser as I use Vivaldi for so much more than reading RSS feeds. I may not keep Inoreader on my iPhone for much longer. I spend considerable time in my PC’s browser, not so much in any application on my iPhone. And I’m not a fan of the constant “buy the pro plan” blurbs that keep popping up (not just on Inoreader but on a lot of other iOS applications that say they’re free with a paid ‘pro’ plan as well).

One last bit of administrative trivia: I’ve set the maximum number of articles you can get the first time to 20. Hopefully this will keep you occupied the first time you try this out.

vivaldi’s tab tiling vs arc’s split view

whbeebe
Vivaldi Tab Tile example

I had a reader of my blog leave me a comment on my post about Arc’s split view that noted Vivaldi has equivalent functionality referred to as tab tiling. It’s a bit more involved than than Arc’s, which I will illustrate.

Vivaldi tab tiling setup

The steps I took to prepare two tabs for tiling where:

  • Pressing the command key and only the command key, select two tabs to be tiled with the mouse. Each tab will have a dashed box drawn around it when selected. Note that this is a bit different than what you will read on the Vivaldi documentation website.
  • Right click on either selected tab to pull up a dialog, and click on ‘Tile 2 Tabs’.

There’s a secret to having the two tabs tiled in the order you want. In my case I wanted the WordPress editor on the left and the other tab on the right. The order of the tiling is dependent on the order of the tabs. Thus, the WordPress tab should be above any other tab you want on the right. The example above doesn’t show that, unfortunately; it’s in reverse order.

After having tried this out I find Arc split view superior because;

  • It’s drag and drop, and
  • It doesn’t matter what order the tabs are in.

The Vivaldi method is too finicky for my tastes. However, if you’re a big Vivaldi fan, then you’ll quickly pick up the process and not really care. Nevertheless it would be nice of the Vivaldi devs would implement tab tiling as drag-and-drop and tab order agnostic. If the Vivaldi developers didn’t implement drag-and-drop, it would be more intuitive if the order the tabs are command key clicked is the order they would be tiled, from left to right.

Links

one way arc’s split view helps me write blog posts