With the surge of web 2.0 (what’s web 2.0) technologies like blogs, wikis, social networking sites, comes the development of services that make life easier. RSS feeds fall into that category by allowing you to quickly view new additions to your favorite websites without visiting each one individually. You can subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed, or any other feed for that matter, in a number of ways.
One way to maximize your time with RSS feeds is to use an RSS aggregrator. Bloglines and Google Reader are examples of web-based applications that I use – you can create a free account and easily add feeds. The feeds will display any new items in a similar fashion to an e-mail account. There are also for-fee services, desktop applications and e-mail-based agregators as well. DMOZ Open Directory Project provides a listing of such services.
If you don’t feel like paying money or creating yet another online account, newer web browsers have the RSS readers built right in. Here’s how to subscribe to feeds with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox:
- In IE7, the page will display the blog entries without the formatting like on the previous page. In the upper left-hand corner, click on the star icon with the plus sign (second from the left). This will pull up a menu that has Subscribe to this Feed as the first option. You can then name the feed and save it to a particular folder. After you’ve saved a feed, you can view the list of subscribed feeds by clicking on the star icon (first from the left) in the upper left-hand corner.
- In Firefox, instead of clicking on the Subscribe to this blog’s feed, you should see an orange icon in the lower right-hand corner. Click on that icon and then on the Subscribe to RSS 2.0 option. The feed will then show up in your Bookmarks folder as a Live Bookmark. You can then view posts individually or go straight to the blog.
Do you use this option in your broswer? Or do you use a web-based aggregator? Which one do you use? Like I said, I know of Bloglines and Google Reader, but I’m sure there’s more out there.
