RSS for Orchid Growers
 

Chances are pretty good that less than 10% of you RSS subscribe to any websites with orchid related content. Less than 10% usage is unfortunately low because 100% of orchid growers can benefit from using RSS.

With that in mind I created a page to help orchid growers understand how RSS works and how they can benefit from it...

RSS for Orchid Growers

Let me know if anybody has any questions regarding the information covered on that page.

Wow, thats pretty cool! I tried to sign up to some of my favorite 'chid nurseries but I didnt work. Does the website have to have the little red thingy in a box to work?

Yup, generally if there aren't any orangish / reddish / yellowish boxes then the site does not have any RSS feeds available. I don't know of any orchid vendors that have RSS feeds.

Once Google comes out with RSS feeds for search results then it will be relatively simple to RSS subscribe to the search results for a specific vendor's website...which would notify you via RSS when they add a new orchid to their inventory.

Sounds good and be sure to keep us updated! Thanks for the heads up!!

Yahoo Pipes!
 

As I mentioned previously not all orchid related websites offer RSS feeds for their content but I'm discovering that with Yahoo Pipes it's possible to create feeds for pretty much any content.

Here are a couple examples...

AOS Articles - A feed that I created for the articles that the AOS occasionally adds to their homepage.

SBOE Orchid of the Day - A feed that I created for the Santa Barbara Orchid Estate's Orchid of the Day feature.

If you're wondering what to do with those URLs then please see RSS for Orchid Growers.

One significant drawback of using Yahoo Pipes to create RSS feeds from scratch is that it's not very user friendly for people who don't know HTML or have never heard of RegEx. On the off chance somebody wants to give it a try then reply to this thread and I'll share a couple notes. Otherwise, if anybody wants me to create a specific feed then please PM me and let me know how many orchids you'll send me for my time :D