VINTOM – Salem Oregon Web Design by Vin Thomas

Get A Life (ONLINE) Part 3: Keeping Track with RSS

Posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009

So now you have your Gravatar, and you’re plugged in to a social network or two. You will notice shortly that it is easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of information that is out there. Checking a dozen blogs each day can be taxing on your time and is not very productive. It gets even worse as you begin to build your reading list to hundreds of blogs that you’d like to read. Luckily there is an easy way to keep up to date with your favorite websites without wasting your time. Wouldn’t it be great if you could be notified when a site posts a new article? Well, you’re in luck. Let me introduce you to RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way to subscribe to a website’s updates. There are 2 parts to RSS that make it useful. The first is the RSS Feed, and the second is the RSS Reader.

The RSS Feed

Most of you have probably heard the term “Feed”. Many sites have a button that says “Subscribe To My Feed”, “Subscribe to RSS”, or something similar. In simple terms, a feed is a way for a site to “feed” you it’s newest content. If you were to subscribe to the VINTOM Feed you would be notified each time I update this blog.

Another way to subscribe to a feed is to click the RSS icon located in many browsers. In Firefox and Safari it will appear in the address bar. Other browsers will handle this differently. One easy way to locate the “Subscribe” button is to look for some variation of the popular RSS icon:

Below are a few examples of how sites creatively display their RSS feed link:

The RSS Reader

Now you know how to subscribe to a feed. The next step is to choose an RSS Reader. Google Reader is the most popular choice, so for the sake of this article, we will use that as an example. To get started with Google Reader, simply log in with your Google Account. If you don’t have a Google Account, get one now.

Ok, you’re ready to start subscribing to feeds. When you subscribe to a feed, Google will often ask you if you want to add the feed to your Google Homepage or add the feed to Google Reader. You want to choose the second option: Add to Google Reader.

Once you have subscribed to the websites and blogs you want to keep up on, you can visit your Google Reader page and view all of the updates. This saves you the time checking to see if a website has updated, because you know that if a website has posted since your last visit, it will appear in your RSS Reader.

You can read the posts directly from your RSS Reader, or if you’d like you can visit the website directly by clicking the link within the Reader.

It’s super easy to get started, and can save you tons of time.

You can test it out right now by subscribing to the VINTOM Blog Feed.

I will leave you with this great little tutorial on how to use the Google Reader.

Stay tuned for the final post in the Get A Life series entitled: Get A Life (ONLINE) Part 4: Starting A Blog