Bluesky buds, wouldn’t it be great if your followers could subscribe not just to YOUR public feed, but also to a feed of just your comic book post updates? Like, imagine you publish a post a week, but it’s gonna get lost in your followers timeline, but what if there was a feed JUST for your comic? Check out this artist’s feed for their current comic: @rivexart.bsky.social
I came across this great concept when I browsed to this artist’s feed (note: nsfw): @rivexart.bsky.social
Click on their “Feeds” tab and this is what you see they have three feeds. two are comics and one is for their art gallery.
Click on one of them and this is what you see:
Amaze! You can share it, of course, save it, or pin it to your home. That way your followers can, basically, subscribe to your feed and use their bsky app as a comic reader (aka rss reader for those ancients among us).
If they pin it to their home feed it’ll show up on their feed tab, up top on their app.
Benefits I see are:
- Easy for followers to find and subscribe to a part of your work that would benefit from being seen in by itself, separate from the rest of your posts.
- Automatically updated (if enabled)
- Someday, maybe, we’ll get notifications for it? That’d be cool!
How do you do it?
Ok, for now you’ll have to use an feed builder app, but I hope that someday WP plugin is written for this because it really should just be part of that.
I used BlueFeed. Go to bluefeed.app and click sign up. When they ask for an App Password, head back to your bluesky, Settings and click on App Passwords
Click “Add Password” and give the password a name, something you’ll remember. Copy the code and save it somewhere (if you lose it, you can just create a new one and then sign in with it again).
Go back to BlueFeed and enter the code.
Now click Create New Feed.
You have several sources you can get your posts from. Let’s say I am going to create a feed for an ongoing comic series I’m working on. So, I’ll select “Search My Posts”
This will search ONLY my posts. Let’s say my comic series is called Burpy Boy: Traveling Circus Detective My strategy will be to tag my posts related to this particular series with #burpyboy-series – any time I make a post for an update of my comic I make sure to tag it with #burpyboy-series. Note, the Search here is a full text search, so if you typed something like “Welcome” it’ll find posts that contain that word and also hashtags. I want to make sure I narrow it down to just tags, so I put the hash/pound mark. Click Search
You’ll get a list of posts it found and you can then add existing posts to the right, sort them as needed, and so on. Check Enable Automatic Update so any new posts you make will automatically be added to the feed (this will take a few minutes after you publish a post, be patient).
Scroll down and give it a name AND an avatar (this is incredibly handy)
Fill in as appropriate click Publish and PRESTO!
Go visit the feed on Bluesky and add it to your own and then publicize the heck out of it. Congrats!
Now, any time you make a new post for that series it’ll show up in that feed, with no other unrelated posts. This gives you the chance to also publish announcements, multiple if you need, on your public, messy timeline, without messing up your comic feed.
Again, I hope in the future that these kinds of feed builders are either part of your blogging platform or a plugin you can add to WordPress. Imagine a directory of these kinds of feeds on another site, just ready for people to search them … hmmm, i might have to dust off my programming skillzzz.
Let me know what you think over on bluesky!