EBSCOhost: RSS alerts

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Paul Pival (The Distant Librarian) has posted a video on youtube how to activate RSS alerts in Ebscohost. Before you get too excited though... Although I have successfully enabled the RSS feed and created the feed, I have not been able to add one of these feeds to either Bloglines or Google Reader although the EBSCOhost support page states that all of these are supported:

  • My Yahoo!
  • CustomReader
  • FeedReader
  • Wizz RSS
  • Bloglines
  • Pluck
  • Safari 2.0
  • NetNewsWire
  • NewsGator
  • Google Reader

In Firefox the feed was displayed correctly with my 3 results, each time I tried to add the feed to either Bloglines or Google Reader I was advised to confirm that the site actually published a feed. Is this because of the ezproxy intervention? For me I'd like this to work in a way where I can see the feed content without being authenticated. I'm very happy to then authenticate to view the full text of the articles. Make the feed open, but the links to articles should include the ezproxy data for my institution. I wonder if that's feasible.

Paul's video...

My alert link:

http://rss.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.bond.edu.au/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=1056713

Comments

Anonymous said…
I was trying those alerts on Friday too. I tried them with Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator and had no success. Quite disappointing. I guess I'll try in Firefox, because I'm curious to see how they work - if they work ...
1:23 am
Peta said…
I tried on campus today and managed to get one step further with a Bloglines subscription. I just used the link as in the post above in web browser, then clicked on my subscribe with Bloglines link. It showed me the add subscription page, but once I clicked the submit button Bloglines could not access the feed.
It's basically flawed for use in a web-based feed-reader environment as far as I can see.
12:52 pm
Unknown said…
Peta,

You can get EBSCOhost to work with EZproxy for off campus access. I have a number of feeds in my Google Reader Account.

The steps are a bit long for a comment so I'll write a post on my blog and let me know what I did.
4:49 pm
Peta said…
Looking forward to seeing it.
Thanks.
10:08 am
Peta said…
You're very helpful as usual, thanks very much.
1:00 pm
Anonymous said…
Now I understand, I think - the feeds would work on desktop readers in an IP authenticated environment. But there'll be issues with web-based readers like Google Reader because it's really Google who gets the feeds and we just view what they captured. Thank you both, Peta and Corey, for your posts on this! I think EBSCO should mention this in the information about their RSS feeds.
2:08 pm
Peta said…
I agree Morgan. Especially as their help page mentions that Google Reader and Bloglines are supported readers, without mentioning that users may need to talk to their Library about authentication problems.
8:09 pm
Unknown said…
I imagine it is something that they don't think about very much. I remember dealing with EBSCO when they first hinted about doing RSS and raising the issue of IP authentication. I was surprised to hear a "Oh!" of surprise.

I imagine that publishers see this type of thing as very new and haven't worked out all of the issues yet. It will be interesting to see the take up of these types of services.

At the end of the day though I suspect it is going to come down to us to get them working for our patrons.
2:47 pm
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