Announcing the new iheartsl.com feeds!
There’s a new development in the SL Blogging World that I’m extremely excited about and happy to announce!!!
The World of SL feeds are a brilliant concept — it’s just that lately, for all we know Tao Takashi could have fallen off the face of the planet. I don’t know what’s going on with him and I hope he’s okay and all, but when literally three months pass by after a request for a blog to be added is STILL not fullfilled despite there being reassurances that it will be, then you know it’s time to (1) quit complaining and (2) take matters into your own hand.
Hence I am pleased to announce a brand spankin’ new feed website, iheartsl.com!
Get your bookmarks ready, folks; so far there are two feeds available on iheartsl:
iheartsl is built around the same premise as World of SL — blogs of feather are categorized under the same feed. The Fashion feed is meant for blogs belonging to fashion blogger and designers, obviously, while the Grid feed is meant for blogs that feature SL news, issues, and resident viewpoints.
Are you a designer who has been waiting to get onto the fashion feed, or a resident who has been wanting to feature their blog on the regular feed? If so, then iheartsl.com WANTS YOU! Everyone who is currently featured on the the WorldofSL feeds have already been added. The site is still just one day old, however, so it’s possible that a few links may have inadvertently been overlooked. If you find that your link is missing, or if you’d like for your own blog to be added, simply visit fashion.iheartsl.com/?p=1 for fashion blogs or grid.iheartsl.com/?p=1 for non-fashion blogs, and leave your URL/feed address in the comments, or send that info to iheartcom@gmail.com.
And YES — you WILL be added promptly! No more waiting for months on end for results; from the time you send in your request to be added, you should see your posts on the feed within twenty-four hours.
Do you own a blog that features content that should be featured on both feeds? Filtering your posts so that the right entries go to the right feed is super easy!
Let’s use my blog as an example…
I run Grid Expectations on WordPress. Although a lot of my entries are about fashion, I do manage to bang out a few non-fashion posts every now and then. To avoid having these show up on the fashion feed, I’ve simply created a category called Fashion.
Every category created in WordPress is assigned a numeric value. You can find the value of the category you’re going to be filing your fashion posts under by hitting your Dashboard > Manage > Categories:
In my dashboard, you can see that the Fashion category has been assigned #3737. All I have to do now is plug that number into the feed URL, which will look like this:
http://gridexpectations.wordpress.com/feed?cat=3737
For those of you that run your blogs on the Google-owned Blogger platform, Blogger offers a Labels system that you can take advantage of. Just be sure to consistently add the label of your choice to all your fashion entries, and then use the labels feed syntax to create your URL feed.
Here’s an example of that syntax at work: I have a blog at iluvtiggy.blogspot.com (seriously, don’t ask about that title, lol). Let’s say I wanted to blog about SL Fashion on there — I simply affix the label “SL Fashion” to each entry as is appropriate, and here is the feed URL for all my SL Fashion posts:
http://iluvtiggy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/SL%20Fashion
Easy as pie 
See you all at iheartsl!
The Metaverse truly is limited only by what we can imagine.
It’s a good idea, Mel. Thanks for taking the initiative. But what I think we really need is a fashion feed that doesn’t have non-fashion on it. So there’s no mix - just designers or just designers and actual fashion blogs.
Gillian, I totally agree, which is why there are the two feeds on iheartsl that I listed above, plus instructions on how to keep non-fashion posts out of the fashion feed. ^_^
I like it very much Mela!Such a good idea for those of us who have one foot on fashion and the other…elsewhere!Heeheh!And of course for all people who wanna have separate feeds!Easier for everybody i think!Way to go!
Right now, worldofsl.com is my main resource for information about Second Life. I welcome grid.iheartsl.com!
…but it looks to me that it still lacks many feeds that are being aggregated to worldofsl.com: ‘Contributors’ list at http://grid.iheartsl.com/?p=1 is way shorter than
‘Subscriptions’ list at http://planet.worldofsl.com
I understand that you’re going to include them as soon as the respective blog owners ask it to you. Well, I’d suggest you not to wait them: instead, import right now all feeds at worldofsl.com. I think that including some inactive blog feeds is not a big issue
By the way you’re stating that ‘Everyone who is currently featured on the the WorldofSL feeds have already been added’, so maybe you already did what I’m proposing and I’m missing something
.. I am not english mother tongue so please forgive me.
Yup - great job! I guess my question was whether there will be moderation as to whether *all* submitted links would be OKd for fashion (or the other).
This is fantastic! Tao would only add me to the fashion feed (not the non-fashion one) even though I explained to him that I did not write a fashion blog. Now, I love the readership I have received, but it also makes people write me nasty-grams.
Thank you for taking this on!!
Aw dang…I’ve been working on something for a few weeks Mel.
http://www.fashionfeedsl.com/
I just haven’t announced it yet as I was still adding. This feed will be moderated and duplicate entries on multiple blogs removed. It will also be strictly FASHION.
GMTA (great minds think alike). good for you and all of us mel.
I’m glad to see that someone else is taking initiative on this as well. I have no idea on where to offer constructive criticism but since you seem to be involved Mela, maybe I can pass it along to you? I know the site is likely still being worked on, but I wanted to suggest using a more “eye-friendly” color scheme - the grey, hot pink, and light grey is murder on the eyes. Maybe something like what you have here would be better? Just a thought. *hug*
Yay! If I ever get a blog out again, I’ll know where to place it now. I think I was misplaced in the other sl fashion feed, when I found out I was showing up in there, I got very uncomfortable posting. My entries are mostly viewpoints and not fashion updates. But I didn’t know how to get out of that feed :S Great job to you guys. Many folks will appreciate this!
I’ll just echo what everyone else has said and congrats to you for the great idea. My questions is somewhat like Gillian’s. There are certain blogs that I don’t care for at all and I’m sure more will come along the way that I have no interest for. Is there a way where we can omit or hide certain blogs from appearing on our end? Just thought I’d ask.
Awesome Melanie!!! YAY!(yay!)
Tao’s been ignoring me too with my new blog
This past summer when Ravishal had to switch blog host Tao would never respond. Only after he got his readers to do a writing campaign to Tao did the feed get switched. I think it would be great if we could all migrate here since Tao seems to be asleep at the wheel.
The new color scheme is MUCH better so if it was you, Mela, or someone else, major thank you’s from me and my eyes. I know some of the formatting kinks must still be getting worked on, but it’s looking much better.
And it’s no big deal if there’s other Fashion feeds Carissa. Great minds think alike and many people will likely add both anyway.
Excellent idea! I would also like to applaud Carissa’s project, the two of you together should provide perfect cover for readers; one covering all blogs, and the other a moderated version with only a selection of blogs. Bravo!
[...] With that said, while we won’t be your fashion police, we definitely intend to keep things running in an orderly manner. What does this mean? It simply means that we want to keep the fashion feed all about… well, fashion! If it comes to the attention of iheartsl staff that there’s been some non-fashion posts appearing, we’ll simply approach the blogger and ask that they filter their posts. [...]
I checked it out…. and am very excited! Only my blog isn’t on it…
Hoping it just got accidently skipped I know that the fashion of SL feed is HUGE. 
Hey Melanie, thanks so much for this post with information as I have absotively no idea how to do this without help.
Wheeee I went to write to ask to be added and already had been yay thank you who ever <3
Lashy said: “…when I found out I was showing up in there, I got very uncomfortable posting.”
This exactly says what I have been thinking for many months. Our blog has always been a mismash of things we’re doing in our RL’s, thoughts, ramblings, as well as things we’re doing in SL, releases, that kind of thing. Once I started getting comments from people who apparently found us via the fashion feed, I felt that I had an obligation to cut back the “non-sl/fashion” related posts. I am thrilled beyond belief to have a work around.
Thank you *SO* much for explaining how to do this, and for giving us the means to express ourselves as designers and as individuals!!
[...] Grid Expectations Announcing the new iheartsl.com feeds! Quote from the site - There’s a new development in the SL Blogging World that I’m extremely [...]
[...] Melanie Kidd is behind this one. She wants to replace planet.worldofsl.com - as Tao Takashi is presumed missing in action. [...]