In September I wrote a blog post about reading RSS feeds for, if not at, your work. (“Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile“) One of the things I discovered in writing that post was the fantastic weekly carnival of medical blogs called the Grand Rounds. This wonderful series has been running for more than 4 years now and many of its participants put great care into their hosting efforts. When it’s their turn to play host the solicit, search for, organize and sometimes summarize an awesome selection of the best posts on medical blogs that week.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any way to subscribe to an RSS or email list of those posts – and I’ve looked really hard! Tonight I’m preparing for a presentation I’m giving tomorrow to a medical tech and civil liberites organization and I really wanted to make such a subscription available for them. So I bit the bullet and made it myself. It was not as easy as I’d like and is going to take a few minutes each week for me to maintain – so if any participants are here reading this and would like to take it over, I’ll show you below not just how I created the feed but how you can help too.

Read on for RSS and email subscription options and step by step instructions describing how this was done. I hope the first commenter from the medical blogging community who stops by will break my heart by showing me an existing RSS subscription option that I just haven’t found yet.

Here’s the feed, give it a click: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrandRoundsFeed

And if you’d like to subscribe by email – here’s a form to do that with.

I tried a lot of things that didn’t work and this is the solution I came up with. It should be reusable in other contexts of course, not just with Grand Rounds.

Step One

Thankfully, there’s already a starting place because Dr. Nicholas Genes, a resident in the Emergency Medicine program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, keeps a Google Calendar of all past and future hosts of the Grand Rounds embedded in a four year old post on his blog.

I clicked the plus button in that embed to subscribe to the calendar in my Google Calendar so I’ll see when and where future editions are being hosted. Unfortunately there’s no permalinks to the particular posts available, it’s just links to the home pages of the host blogs.

Step Two

What I’m going to do is click on each link that comes into my calendar each Tuesday morning, visit the host blog, find the permalink to the Grand Round post and tag it “grandroundsfeed” in my Delicious account.

Step Three

Delicious publishes an RSS feed for everything I as a user tag as “grandroundsfeed.” I took that RSS feed and put it through FeedBurner. Feedburner lets me keep track of how many subscribers there are, add a link to the end of every item that says please visit Marshallk.com and take over maintance of this feed from me please, offer subscription to the links by email, transfer control of the feed to another Feedburner account holder when someone capable volunteers and perhaps most importantly, it lets me switch out the source feed when the time comes to be instead the feed of someone else’s delicious account items tagged “grandroundsfeed” (or any other tag of their choosing).

That’s it! It’s as simple as that. If no one volunteers to tag the new link each week, I’ll just keep doing it mself. It will only take 2 minutes and it’s a great public service for an awesome round up of content. We could create a widget that displays these links each week, we could do all kinds of things with it. I’m fantasizing about a combination of Dapper.net, PostRank and maybe one other tool to create a “best of” Grand Rounds feed that would deliver only the most popular links from the entire collection each week. I probably won’t take the time to try to figure that out, but I think it’s doable.

Subscription options are, again, up above these instructions. Obviously if you’re interested in getting any help with projects like this for your organization, drop me a line, but hopefully these instructions are clear enough that you could do it yourself with one hand tied behind your back.

In the mean time – enjoy the awesome medical blogosphere round ups. If you want to see some examples, recent ones include Dr. Deb’s adorable iTunes playlist version and the wacky Grand Round in the form of medical blog posts re-interpreted as job advice for Barack Obama over at Musings of a Distractable Mind. See also the recent edition at the very nicely produced Nurse Ratched’s Place. Next week is at Canadian Medicine. I just linked to particular recent posts of all of these blogs so they’d get a trackback notification about this post. Is that trackback spam? I don’t think it is.

Happy feed creation in whatever fields you’re in!