My New Link Blog and How to Set Up Your Own Link Blog

Hi Everyone! I have recently created a link blog. I will be using it to highlight research, news articles, and blog posts about older adults. These are articles which are interesting, but not directly related to library services. I have links to the most recent 5 articles on the right side of this page under the heading "Recent Interesting Articles for Older Adults". Next, under these articles is a link you can use to subscribe to the link blog. If you want to see all the articles, you can go directly to my Shared Item's Page here.

If you are reading "Senior Friendly Libraries" as a feed (RSS subscription), you do not have to go to my blog home page to view this new link blog, you can click here. If you would like to subscribe to the link blog, this is the feed.

Please let me know if you like these articles - you can add a comment to this post or email me (parttimelibrarian [at] yahoo.com).

How to set up a simple link blog:

If you are interested in creating your own quick and simple link blog, you may want to try this out. I used the Google Reader "Shared Items" feature. First you need to have a Google Reader account. This is my favorite feed aggregator for reading RSS feeds. As you are reading your subscriptions and come upon a post that you want to share with people, all you have to do is click on the word "Share" under that post:



It automatically sends the article to your own Google Shared Item Page.
To view this page, you click on the "Shared Items link" in the top left part of the Google Reader Page:

Your shared items are publicly accessible and the address is visible when you click on "shared items":

You can email the link to your friends.You can also publish this link on your blog or use the feed URL that Google provides to add a subscription (RSS) link for your blog. If you use Feedburner to measure your blog's readership statistics, you can use the Google Shared Item's URL to burn a feed in Feedburner. Then you can use that feedburner URL on your blog's homepage to link to your shared items. That way you can also measure the number of subscribers to your link blog. This works with Blogger, but I do not know if it works with other blogging software like Wordpress.

There are many other ways to set up a link blog, such as by setting up a feed from a Del.icio.us account. However, I found the Google Shared Items method to be both easy to set up and very convenient for adding links.

Note: The screen shots above show a post from Beanworks, a blog from Carol Bean. She is a librarian who has written many articles about teaching computers to older adults. She also wrote a very useful article that taught me how to screencast and one about creating handouts with visual cues.