If your new to the blog then you should review some of the current contests we have running.

1. Our Review our Name for a Domain – This has gone very well we had 31 reviews and still have room for another 19 before the contest is over. If you would like to still do a review then do so before those last 19 reviews are gone.
2. Massive Technology Show Review - This contest is also still running. I have seen no reviews yet. The winner will receive a full access pass to the Massive event and be able to participate in the full day event. The value of the ticket is $149.

If you have some spare time to post on these I suggest you do. It really costs you nothing and you can win either a domain or free tickets.

If you are using IE7 then you have may have noticed that some sites you visit that the icon like the picture to the right lights up. This means that IE7 has detected an RSS feed on the site. If it has detected that RSS feed you can then subscribe to the feed.

So lets say you have a blog with an RSS feed or you just made your own . Now you want to let people know it is there. To have IE7 detect it you need to add a bit of code into your header. That code looks like this:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”BlueFur.com – Blog” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bluefurcom?format=xml” mce_href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bluefurcom?format=xml”>

This will make your RSS button in IE7 light up. You can also add multiple RSS feeds to your page if you have more then one by adding the same code above but by changing the title and href.

I suggest that if you have a blog that is an extension of your main site that you add this code to your main page to increase the number of RSS readers to your blog.

Well if you read the blog regularly you will see I was attempting to make an RSS feed for our main site (which is not dynamic). We are testing this to see is there is any SEO advantage to having a feed on our main site. Also our regular customers can subscribe to the feed and if we add anything to the site they can be updated.

So after looking at various automated versions I decided to just do it myself.

Step 1
Open any basic text editor. I am going to use notepad.

Step 2
Define the document type:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
 <rss version=”0.91″>

Step 3
Define your RSS feed settings:

 <channel>
 <title>BlueFur.com</title>
 <link>http://www.bluefur.com</link>
 <description>BlueFur.com – Canada Web Hosting </description>
 <language>en-us</language>

Step 4
Create an item:

<item>
<category>Main Page</category>
<title>Welcome to BlueFur.com</title>
 <link>http://www.bluefur.com</link>
 <description>
 BlueFur.com is a leader in Canadian web services.
</description>
</item>

Step 5
Close the RSS feed:

 </channel>
 </rss>

Step 6
Save the file with a .rss extension and upload it. You should now be able to view it.

You can view our progress of building it here. I recommend that if you have a site you consider building a simple RSS to see how it works. It is a lot easier then I thought it was going to be.

New Media BC (NMBC) invites you to spend an informal unspecified amount of time to engage in any one of the following activities Wednesday February 28th from 4 to 7pm. Feel free to mix and match, make up your own inventive combinations or sample the vanilla version of our menu.

• Network with industry peers
• Converse with our savvy and sophisticated staff
• Peruse our exciting roster of upcoming events and make suggestions of your own
• Experience the healing benefits of our member perks
• Hover near the catering table to be the first to sample the next yummy morsel
• Critique the background music and the eye candy demo reels of members work.

If you  have anything to do with media in BC then I suggest you sign up today.

PS – Thanks for reminding me of this Erin

In this day and age it is very easy to stay on top of your Public Relations. Imagine if you could search a majority of the blogs for your own keyword like your business name or blog name. If you knew what people were saying you could either respond in there blog or take action based on that persons feedback.

Well you can do that today and I suggest you do it. Go to Google Blog Search and type in your business name.

For BlueFur we get 89 results. How many do you get for your company name?

Notice you can save this search as an RSS feed. That means if something new comes in you can be notified by your RSS reader. It also has an option to be notified by email if you don’t have an RSS reader.

I suggest you keep on top of your own Public Relations because now it is even easier then ever.

I am working on a project to make our regular BlueFur.com site into an RSS feed. That way you can subscribe to it and any time something changes you can be notified. This is also a test to see how the search engines will like RSS for a non-blog site.

The first tool I tested which was free is XML:Wrench. The tool looks like most code editors when you open it. You can use it as a code editor. I downloaded this for main reason to convert pages from HTML/PHP to XML. After opening a page I got stuck. The option to convert was greyed out and no documentation as to why.

I would not recommend this tool. I am still seeking for a scrapper that will allow me to convert our site into an RSS feed. If you know of any good tools post it the comments.