About Diigo and Inoreader: My African Books Feed

I got an email from someone this morning asking about Diigo and Inoreader, and I thought I would post the reply I sent him here in case others are curious about the RSS magic that goes on when you use Inoreader to subscribe to a Diigo bookmark using Diigo RSS.

Here's how that works:

I decide on a Diigo tag or combination of tags that I want to keep track of in Inoreader. For example, I want to use Inoreader to display my latest African folklore bookmarks on my homepage here: MythFolklore.net. (That's actually a combination feed with Diigo and blog posts, so in addition to showing selected Diigo bookmarks, it also displays blog posts too... so when I post this post, it will show up there!)

Here's how I set up the Inoreader-Diigo RSS to make that happen:

Diigo search. So, to do that I make sure to use the tag "onlinebooks" in Inoreader when I add a new book. So when I search Diigo for #onlinebooks that gives me these results (it's important to include the hashtag in the search!)

This is what you will see as the URL for those search results:

https://www.diigo.com/user/laurakgibbs?query=#onlinebooks
You can share that link with others too! Being able to share collections of Diigo bookmarks with my students this way was a very useful feature of Diigo!

Diigo RSS. Then I go down to the bottom of the Diigo page where there is the RSS link for that specific tag search.

When I click on that RSS icon, Diigo gives me this RSS address:
https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/laurakgibbs?key=5af583f8fdff82a8ba417ffd4944f88d&query=%23onlinebooks&sort=updated
(you can click on that to see the actual raw RSS feed)

Subscribe in Inoreader to Diigo RSS. I then go to Inoreader and subscribe to that RSS link. That means I now see the new Diigo bookmarks with that "onlinebooks" tag automatically showing up in Diigo.

That's all there is to it! Now any new Diigo bookmark with the "onlinebooks" tag will show up there in my Inoreader.

Inoreader export. That also means I can use the Inoreader export feature to make those same new bookmarks show up, via HTML, in my homepage. To use the export feature, I put the feed into a folder, since export features in Inoreader work only on folders OR on Inoreader tags, so you can see there I've got the Diigo feed inside a folder; that's what lets me do the export to my homepage that you saw in the screenshot above. Here are the folder properties that give me access to the HTML export:

The folder can contain all kinds of different RSS feeds, like the folder I use to run my homepage feed, which contains my latest blog posts and Diigo bookmarks, and also items from Padlet, another service with RSS. I've written a lot more about these Inoreader features at Summer2020.LauraGibbs.net.

Boosting the RSS refresh. There's a bit of a delay because Inoreader only pings the Diigo feed once an hour, but you can go in and boost the interval so that it checks every 10 minutes (although this may be a premium feature; I'm not sure... I have a premium account because I really like using Diigo rules which is a premium thing). Here's what the booster looks like in the subscriptions management panel 

See the little rocketship icon? That's the booster, which has it set for 10 minutes. That means Inoreader checks the Diigo RSS source every 10 minutes to see if there is anything new to add.

I love Inoreader! I relied on Inoreader to run my student blog network with RSS while I was teaching, and now that I've retired, I'm building a new kind of Inoreader system that relies on blogs, Diigo, and also Padlet to keep track of the projects I am working on. It's fun thinking of new ways to use RSS for the work I'm doing now and sharing my progress via my homepage too. :-)