Dot Your Feeds

Here's a tip for our news junkies out there. I've recently been playing with Google's RSS Reader. They've implemented a really fast online feed reader that's a great way to skim through the RSS feeds you subscribe to. They also have a sharing feature that creates a web page (My Shared Page) and an associated RSS feed of all the stories you want to "share". Here's where Blue Dot comes in. I have set up the Auto-Dotting from My Blog feature of Blue Dot, to automatically scan the shared items I've read in Google reader, and create corresponding dots. That way, my friends on Blue Dot can see (and comment) on what I'm reading. Click here to see what my Google Reader items look like in Blue Dot. Here's how to set up Google Reader to share your favorite feeds on Blue Dot:

1. Create a Google Reader account if you don't already have one.
2. Subscribe to your favorite news feeds (Google offers some suggestions if you don't already have some).
3. When you read a story you want to share, click the "Share" button at the bottom of the article (alternately, just type SHIFT-S, to use the keyboard shortcut).
4. Click on "Shared Items" in the left hand column. You should see your stories listed here.
5. Click on the "a feed" link and copy the text from your browser's Address bar (it will look something like: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/09892608792699866194/state/com.google/broadcast
6. Log in to Blue Dot and go to your Auto-Dotting page (Tools/Auto Dot From My Blog).
7. Choose "Custom Feed" and paste the above link into the URL field.
8. I use the tag "fromrss" to identify my Google Reader dots.
9. Click Configure Blog.

Whew! That's it. You should notice your new shared dots created in your account within 30 minutes. Blue Dot periodically will check your Google Reader account to see if you've shared anything new. Send me (mike) a message on Blue Dot if you set this up in your account or if you have any problems.

Check our our new Blue Dot Wiki

We've started a Wiki site (hosted by our friends at Wet Paint). We'll be answering frequently asked questions, provide tips and tricks about some of our more advanced (hidden) features. As fans of Blue Dot we hope you'll check it out, and even contribute to the Wiki to help make Blue Dot a better experience for everyone. Blue Dot Wiki Blue Dot FAQ

Blue Dot hard to reach?

Some of our users have reported that they are having trouble getting to Blue Dot today. We believe that this is/was because of a problem with the Internet DNS (name) servers. We have taken steps to resolve the problem, but due to the nature of DNS, our fix may take some time to propagate to all user's computers. Please bear with us if you are having trouble getting to bluedot.us during the next 24 hours. We're sorry for the inconvenience.