About Notes from the Fatosphere

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• What it is
• How To See All the Posts on the Feed
• Blogs on the Feed 
• The Link to Use
• Adding the Notes to your Blog
• Adding Your Blog to the Notes
• Including only Some of Your Posts
• If Your Posts Aren’t Showing Up

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What it is  

The Notes is an aggregate feed that pulls from a number of blogs dealing (thoughtfully) with fat, body politics, etc. Weight loss blogs aren’t included (if you want weight loss talk, the internet is not without other options for you).

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How to See All the Posts on the Feed

You can find them here. If you scroll to the bottom it will give you an option to see “more” posts and you should be able keep doing this indefinitely until you’ve run through all the posts on the feed.

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Which blogs are on the Feed?

Here is the master list of blogs on the feed.  Blogs are routinely being added and occasionally removed, but currently there are approximately 80 blogs on the feed. I have a list of another few dozen I need to check out to maybe/maybe not include, so not all fatosphere blogs are currently on the feed, and the most comprehensive and up-to-date list of blogs and Livejournal Communities can be found here at BABble.
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The Link to Use

Notes from the Fatosphere (RSS 2.0)

Try to use this feedburner link, and not the feed linked to on Google Reader, because if I ever switch aggregators, the Google feed will no longer be updated. But the feedburner link above should always be good.

Although it’s preferable to start with the link above, if your feed reader is having trouble with RSS 2.0, you can also try one of these alternative formats:

Notes from the Fatosphere (Atom 1.0)
Notes from the Fatosphere (Atom 0.3)
Notes from the Fatosphere (RSS 1.0)

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Adding the Notes to Your Blog

Feel free to add it to your blog. In fact yay! if you do. Below are some general instructions to help you out – it’s usually pretty easy. Also, if you have technical problems, fatosphere bloggers can apply for an account and ask for help at FABS – the message board Lindsay at BABble just set up for fatosphere bloggers. You can also email me with questions (or Lindsay at BABble is also pretty damn expert in technical issues).

Blogger users: Click “edit layout” “template” “page elements” and then click “add a page element” in the sidebar section. Select “Feed” insert the URL above at the prompt, and customize to taste. Save.

WordPress.com users: just use add the RSS widget (under “presentation,” “widgets”). Drag an RSS widget (e.g. RSS 1) from the bottom of the page onto your sidebar, click on it, and put in the feed URL above. Title and customize to taste. Save.

Users of WordPress software hosted outside of WordPress.com: (see here if that statement confuses you – but if it does you probably don’t need to pay attention to this paragraph).  Opensource WordPress users may need to use the Atom 1.0 version, as the included RSS widget doesn’t parse the links correctly in the RSS 2.0 format. At least for some people. Anyhoo, I’ve tested the Atom 1.0 version and it seems to work with the opensource WordPress software – but if you’re still having problems, let me know.

Livejournal users: As far as I know feeds can’t be added to Livejournal blogs. But LJ does let you add syndicated feeds to your friends page. The Notes has been syndicated here and can be added from that page.

Springwidgets - Although I’ve never tried it myself, I mention it because some people have added the Notes to their blog using Springwidgets. You can check out The Rotund to see how it looks.

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Adding your Blog to the Notes

If you want your blog included or removed from the notes, drop me an email at fatfu9 AT yahoo.com. It’s not a great idea to post a comment here, since I may miss it if it’s a heavy flow day (comment-wise that is) or the spaminator may zap it if it contains a link.

I tend to do things on the weekends, and I like to at least have a looksee at blogs before I add them, mainly to make sure they’re not hawking miracle weight loss cures. But feel free to nag me if you don’t hear back within a reasonable time – I get a lot of email and I don’t want to miss requests.

Filtering Your Posts by Tag

If your blog is not mainly fat-related, but you have occasional posts you’d like to see in the Notes, we can try to arrange to have the Notes pick up only posts you tag with the keyword “fat.” That helps keep on-topic posts from being bumped off by tons of vacay-pic or puppy pic posts. It also means that people don’t feel like they always have to always have to talk about fat if they want their fat posts included in the Notes.

Filtering means threading your post through Yahoo Pipes which is both brilliant and completely mad. So it may need some hovering over and tweaking at first, but it’s totally doable.

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If your posts aren’t showing up

First of all, give it a little time. The parsers that read the various feeds refresh at different rates (e.g. WordPress’s RSS parser refreshes only every hour). But if your post doesn’t show up in a few hours, nag me, please. I can’t keep track of each blog individually, so I need to hear if posts are getting dropped.