BlawgSearch is Justia’s law blog directory and search engine. While BlawgSearch can be used to explore new legal blogs, it really shines as a current awareness tool to keep you up-to-date on news and legal developments in your areas of practice or interest.
To take advantage of this feature, you can subscribe to one of our many category-based RSS feeds (e.g., criminal law or bankruptcy). These RSS feeds aggregate blog posts from numerous law blogs and can be read from your favorite RSS reader. Additionally, BlawgSearch allows you to create custom RSS feeds based on legal keywords or phrases, or citations to specific statutes, regulations or cases. This post will show you how to access these feeds to develop a collection of content relevant to your areas of interest and focus.
But, before we show you how to customize your feeds, let’s first make sure you know how to sign up for the general category feeds, and also explain some of your other options when viewing these feeds. From the Blawgsearch home page, select a category that is of interest to you. For example, if you are interested in civil rights law, click on the Civil Rights link.
The Civil Rights page features posts from civil rights blogs, sorted by the popularity of each blog. In the upper right-hand corner, you can toggle between the different sorting options: popularity, name or last post date.
You can also select between the default Expanded View, which displays blogs with their three most-recent posts in a tabular format, and List View, which lists each blog with its description and URL.
If you’d like to subscribe to an RSS feed of the latest 20 posts or the latest 100 posts from the civil rights category, click on corresponding link after “RSS Subscribe” to view each feed.
On the Expanded View page, if you see one particular blog to which you would like to subscribe (rather than all the blogs in this category), you can click on the “Subscribe” button below each listed blog to view the blog feed, or automatically subscribe using Bloglines, My Yahoo!, Google Reader or another web-based feed reader.
Creating Customized Blawgsearch Feeds
In addition to subscribing to RSS feeds based on our legal subject categories, you can also create your own customized BlawgSearch feeds based on a legal keyword or phrase, abbreviations of popular names of different statutes, titles and cases, or even by a specific legal citation.
Using the search box at the top of the page, start by typing in your area of interest, e.g., fair use. (Search Tip: place quotes around your search terms, e.g., “fair use”, to search for exact phrases, this helps you to narrow and fine point your search results).
By default, your results will be ordered by relevance, but you can always click on the Sort by Date link at the top of the page to re-arrange your results. You can also view the RSS feeds which features posts where the term “fair use” appears in all the indexed blogs in Blawgsearch by clicking on the 20 results or 100 results link by “RSS Subscribe.” Below are a few more examples of different searches of keywords, citations and phrases in Blawgsearch which can be turned into customized RSS feeds.
We hope this brief tutorial has been helpful!
Peace,
The Justia Portal Team
