There are thousands of websites and you might be interested in ten or twenty of them. How do you know if a new post has been published to that website? Chances are that your site that you want to know about publishes something called a Real Simple Syndication Feed or RSS feed. Read on for more information on RSS Feeds and how to use them.
Most blog publishers and publishers of normal web sites make use of the RSS feed mechanism. In fact a RSS feed builder is built into WordPress.org. There is even a service called FeedBurner to uses this RSS feed to provide a lot of services to the publishers, as well as making it easy for you to subscribe to these feeds.
Why would you want to subscribe? RSS Feeds make it easy to see which articles are new on all of your websites that you want to know about. Most Publishers indicate these icons by using the standard icon to represent the link to their feeds. The following are some images of the icon.
To make use of these feeds you need some kind of feed aggregator like netnewswire, or gruml. However you might want to take a look at another solution for your RSS feeds. Google has a web application called Google Reader that will allow you to assemble your feeds and then read them. Google Reader has become something of a standard now, because a lot of feed aggregators use google reader as the server part of their client. If you don’t mind reading your feeds on the web then Google Reader is right for you.
If you have a google account already then, all you have to do is sign into Google Reader with your Google account id and password. the location of the reader application is http://www.google.com/reader . That should take you to the reader, just sign in with your google account or make a google account.
How can Google afford to offer this application for free? The trade off here is that Google gathers information from your feeds and the selections you make. Also some FeedBurner users allow Google to display ads in some of their posts. Trust me Google is making money off this free app.
To use a feed URL in Google Reader you need to copy it. Click on the RSS Feed icon. When the page shows click on the URL bar on your browser and copy it to the clipboard with ctrl-c. Go to the Google Reader app and click on the add a subscription button. Paste in the URL from the clipboard and click the add button. The RSS feed url will now be copied into Your Google Reader Account.
If the publisher of the website in question uses Feed Burner, then you have a choice to add the feed to a web based reader, or to use a client application. That option looks like this:
You may notice that you can in fact subscribe by email. This is a service provided by Feed Burner. If you prefer you can receive links to the new posts on a daily basis. I try to post Monday through Saturday, so if you subscribe to a email newsletter you will receive a daily email. If you like this Blog, then by all means use our RSS feed to subscribe to our site.
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