Tip #1: How to use Racks and Tags with social aggregator websites
If you are, like me, an avid user of social aggregator websites (e.g. FriendFeed), you may already wonder if Racks and Tags feeds can be used to inform your social network friends when you add new cool albums, post album ratings, or play some obscure records.Aggregator websites offer many benefits besides just sending update to your friends. For example:
- It feels great to keep all your news in one place.
- It’s easy to start conversations around music. Your feed visitors are likely to notice if you have some interesting and non-trivial music in stock.
- It’s easy to find soul friends – nothing talks about a person more than his or her music feed.
- and let’s not forget about the cool factor.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to automatically send your CD collection updates to your social network buddies. The instructions below are for the added albums feed, but you can also do it for the rated and played albums as well.Note: this will not work if your Racks and Tags collection is private or friends-only! Private means private, we take it seriously and don’t show private information to anyone – not even to friendly websites. So before continuing, check your collection privacy status here and make sure it is public.Then click Your Collection link in menu bar to go to your profile page. Right-click the Added tab on the right, and select “Copy shortcut” from the popup menu. (Tip: this menu command is called “Copy link location” in Firefox.) Then go to your FriendFeed page and click “Share something” on top of your feed. Click “Import your stuff”, select “Blog” and paste your link. The resulting URL should look like this:http://www.racksandtags.com/<username>/?m=addedFinally, press “Import Feed” button.Now, when you add new album to your collection, the update will be immediately posted on Racks and Tags RSS feed. Shortly FriendFeed will detect the change and display it in your personalized feed, ready to be seen and commented on by your friends.This was the first in Weekly Tips series of blog posts that I plan to publish regularly. If you discovered some cool and non-trivial way to use your Racks and Tags, have a suggestion for the future tips, or would like to add something to the current tip – please comment or send e-mail to webmaster@racksandtags.com.
How about an iPhone app to read/lookup my database?