Making an animated RSS feed for QRZ & 73s page.

How to post your RSS feed on your qrz.com or 73s.org page:


Have you ever wanted to keep your qrz.com or 73s.org pages updated with a dynamic widget showing the most recent entries from your blog? Then a RSS feed may be what you are looking for. This simple syndication tool is a very easy but powerful tool for making your website/blog content available in multiple places quickly. In the tradition of amateur radio Elmer-ing, I am writing this post to let you know how I am using this tool. You may find it helpful in your Ham related project also. With some simple copying and pasting, you too can have these automated tools helping you share you amateur radio experience.

Disclaimer:To be clear, I am not a web guru, and all advice here is offered as an example of what I have done and has no warranty either implied or otherwise. My goal is to share what I have learned in order to encourage more amateur radio blogging & twittering because the web is one of our best resources.

One of the easiest way to share your work in "Hamology", as Gordon West calls it, is to start with a blog with an automatically generated RSS feed. Any of the major blogging engines these days have this feature so that is not an issue. (List available at bottom of post) The RSS feed itself is a small XML document listing the titles and URLs of items on your blog in chronological order. Once you have found your RSS feed location, just start a Feedburner account and point it toward the file to take advantage of the options the service provides. The Feedburner help section covers this in much more detail.

What you can do with your feed:
Now that you have your RSS feed setup, you can start leveraging the power of Feedburner to help promote your blog on your qrz.com or 73s.org bio page. Click on the "Publicize" tab of your Feedburner account to find the option we are working with.
Once you are in the "Publicize" tab, just click on "Headline Animator" and follow the instructions to create a animated headline like the one I have at the top of this post.
In order to add the animated headline to my qrz and 73s pages, I selected "Other(just gimme the code)" and posted the resulting HTML code into the pages. In my case I unchecked the " Grab this link" check box from the resulting pop-up window for a cleaner look.




Below I have screen shots of the resulting widget additions to my qrz and 73s pages.
I hope you have found this post helpful.

Resulting 73s.org and qrz.com pages:

List of free blog sites that offer RSS feeds:
Blogger
WordPress
LiveJournal

In the next post, I will cover automatically adding your blog content to your Twitter page. Please share your ideas/corrections in the comments section.

qrz.com has a fantastic HTML editor!

I have long wished to have a more interesting qrz.com bio page and tonight I finally did something about it. While logged into qrz.com, I selected the "click for more detail..." green bar and selected the "Edit Record" button noted in the image above. In resulting page, I clicked on the "Add or edit your biography text, fonts, etc." link and found the following simple HTML editor that is great for adding details to any QRZ bio.

With the advent of "Web 2.0" and all the online media options many people would like to add more than text and an image or two. In that case qrz.com has you covered. If you look toward the bottom and select the "Advanced" button you get a HTML editor with much more power and advanced options.

Embedding videos, editing the actual HTML code, it's all there. I particularly liked the ability to toggle between regular webpage and full screen editor mode. They even have multiple pasting options for copying your data into the page. I feel I have only scratched the surface on this powerful FREE tool, but I can assure I will learn more and report back here. Below I have attached before and after pictures so you can judge the abilities if this editor for yourself. Just click on any of these images for a larger view. I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, but the this well engineered website has me thinking I could be! QRZ relies on contributions from the amateur radio community and I will be making one soon, hope you can too.
Update:
I have traded a few emails with Fred L Lloyd AA7BQ and found out that the advanced HTML editor software is the open source Java based TinyMCE, the platform you would expect from a long-time Sun man like Fred.


Before &After: