Have you ever come across a webpage that you wanted to subscribe to in your RSS reader only to be disappointed to discover that it didn’t have an RSS feed? Perhaps it’s the occasional “blog”¹ that for some strange reason lacks RSS (e.g., Tim Keller’s or David Alan Black’s).

Well, Google Reader has come to the rescue with a new feature that allows you to subscribe to any page even if it lacks an RSS feed. Simply click on the “Add a subscription” button and input the URL for the page that you want to subscribe to. If Google Reader can’t find an RSS feed, it will offer to create one.

Once Google creates a feed for that page, the next person who tries to subscribe to that same page will be able to do so automatically without being asked if they want to have Google create a feed.

What pages are you going to start subscribing to now that you couldn’t before?

HT: Mashable

Footnotes

1. I put quotes around it because I’m not sure I’m willing to recognize a site without an RSS feed as a true blog. I’m half joking. ↩

Google’s new audio indexing, GAudi, looks very promising. Finally the ability to find what you’re looking for in audio or video without listening to the whole thing! This has huge potential for sermons and lectures and could really make audio and video more accessible sources for academic research.

I wish I had access to this technology when I was running down this quote.

Check it out: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.

Read more:

• TechCrunch: “Google Launches Audio Indexing”
• ReadWriteWeb: “Google Audio Indexing: Keyword Searches for Political Videos”
• Google Blog: “Google Audio Indexing now on Google Labs”

Before you make your next online purchase, you may want to use Live Search Cashback. Microsoft will pay you anywhere from 2–10% cash back—those are the numbers I’ve seen—on any qualifying purchases from participating stores. No strings attached. Before cashing in on your rewards you have to wait 60 days and accrue at least $5 of cash back rewards. Once you meet both of those stipulations, you can get your funds sent to you via (1) PayPal, (2) a bank account, or (3) a paper check in the mail.

This is Microsoft’s attempt to get Googlers to start using their Live search. I’m not about to switch permanently from Google, but why not save a little more on my online purchases?

Update: Just got an email, 60 days after my purchase, notifying me that my $13.74 in cashback rewards are ready to be claimed. I visited my page, clicked Pay Me, entered my bank information, and got this message:

Your cashback is on its way! Microsoft will initiate a payment of $13.74 to your Bank account XXXX in approximately 14 days. We will send an e-mail message to you at philgons@gmail.com with these details.

For all you Google Reader users out there, you’ll be glad to know that you can finally search your feeds—both read and unread items! This is especially handy if you don’t tag an item and can’t remember where you read it. I use Google’s Web History to look up stuff like this, but it doesn’t work with feeds unless you actually visited the site. I will put this feature to good use.

One other thing I’ve requested is to show more than “100+” when displaying the total number of unread items. Many of my folders often have 100+, especially over the weekends when I don’t check my work-related feeds, so I don’t know if 100+ is in the 100s or 900s! Do I try to skim through them, or just mark them all as read? Now that it displays unread items up to 1000, making that decision will be a little easier. While many may not appreciate this, it will be a big help to those of us who are subscribed to 500+ feeds (640 to be exact).

Bloglines also announces some new features. The Google Reader–Bloglines battle continues.

Read More:

• Read/Write Web:
  • Google Reader Adds Search; Bloglines Playing Catch-up in Features
  • Bloglines vs Google Reader Update: Can Bloglines Hold On?

• Bloglines News: The Latest Construction on Bloglines Beta 1.01. – Pin, Send Email, Help and Hotkeys

The folks at OpenBible.info have done a real service to the Christian community by tagging every identifiable location in the Bible for Google Earth. You can download the KMZ file and explore any place in the Bible. They even give you all of the passages where each location occurs—hyperlinked to the ESV. I love being able to see the places about which I’m reading, and being able to zoom in and interact with them in a 3D environment beats a 2D map or image as far as I’m concerned, though being able to preview and link to these locations in Google Maps is still pretty cool. Here’s an example of all the locations in Galatians. And here’s a neat post that traces the locations in the Bible through six historical periods. I’m hoping Logos will implement my suggestion and use this data to link to these locations from within their software.

For more info visit:

• OpenBible.info Geocoding
• OpenBible.info Blog

HT: ESV Blog

Update: This blog post gives simple instructions for using the data in Google Earth.