How to Quickly Get Updated on Civil War Blog Topics of Your Choice

Editor’s Note: This post has been repurposed from an earlier one at The Siege of Petersburg Online.  Though the links are to SOPO, the same idea applies here at TOCWOC.  Follow along on topics you are interested in by using this simple trick.

Are You Interested in a Specific Civil War Topic?  A Lot of Readers Are

Bill Black, a Siege of Petersburg Online reader, recently sent me an email about the 148th Pennsylvania, wanting to know more information about his chosen topic of interest.  A lot of readers come to this site reactively looking for specific articles on their topic of interest using the search box.  But there is a better way, and it’s  easy to set up.

I want to share a little trick at this point to help readers monitor topics of their choice.  I use tags to describe what every post on this site is about.  If a certain Civil Wat topic is mentioned in a post, that post will be tagged with the unit’s name.  For instance, any post concerning the famous 5th Texas of the Texas Brigade will be tagged “5th texas“, and all tags for a post appear at the bottom of a given post, with an image of the example above displayed down below:

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How to Receive Emails About Your Interest Automatically

Now I’ll show you a neat little trick which you can use on literally ANY of the thousands of tags on this site.  Left click on a tag name, like the tags displayed above, to get to the tag’s page.  You’ll see the URL, in this case http://www.beyondthecrater.com/tag/5th-texas/ for the 5th Texas.  This page shows you a list of posts which contain the tag.  Now for the trick.  Simply add “feed/” to the end of the tag URL, like so, http://www.beyondthecrater.com/tag/5th-texas/feed, and go to that web page.  I use Feedburner to produce all of my site feeds, and one of the nice features is that you can subscribe to specific tags, allowing you to be updated by email or in a feed reader when a new post appears with that tag name.  If you left click on the example above, you’ll see the ability to subscribe to the feed near the top of the page.  It’s a great way to follow along here as I continue to add content on a weekly basis, and it’s a proactive rather than reactive way to get the specific content you want sent right to your inbox.