Quote Originally Posted by SWCAdmin View Post
Two requests....

1) Post any problems / insights with using the feed in this thread, or e-mail to webmaster@smallwarsjournal.com. Details would help - crystal ball is cloudy, foresight is sparse, your sitreps from the bleeding edge will allow us to improve.

2) If anyone has some tips and/or how-to links for our many users who can get it and might use this, but don't at the moment have a clue about this syndication / feed / reader stuff (like me ), please post those here.
I'm new to the RSS stuff as well. I recently signed up and use Google Reader, and instead of using the link that was in the original post, I just did a search for feeds within Google Reader (click on "add subscription"), and the "smallwarsjournal.com" search turned up the "SWJ Blog" as the first hit and "Small Wars Council - Powered by vBulletin" as the fourth hit. The message board feed appears to just feed new threads (i.e., the first post in a thread), which is perfect. A feed with every comment would be too much. This took all of about two minutes to do.

I would recommend doing two other feeds:

1) A feed for blog comments. Where this would be helpful is for an older blog post where a new comment won't be seen since the blog is ordered by post date only.

2) If vBulletin supports, allow a subscription to a thread where instead of being emailed, it is sent via RSS.

I haven't explored all the potential of Google Reader, but one thing that is useful is that you can both star a particular post and put tags on it. Thus, it can be catalogued for future use instead of having to get the search words just right. Hope this helps.