RSS Feeds and Google Reader
This is a “double-duty” post.
- Writers need to know about the emerging RSS Feed delivery system. There’s a good chance it will eventually affect your work.
- Readers of this blog may wish to subscribe to our own RSS Feed. This is a blatant reminder.
Now that our Feed problem has been solved [thanks to Jon at FeedBurner support and participants at the WordPress Forum], it’s time to discuss the RSS phenomenon. For those unfamiliar with RSS, it is a facility that allows readers to direct content from wide-ranging blogs and websites into a single “reader.” No longer must one manually browse from site to site. Now all of the content in your favorite sites is accumulated [”aggregated” is the term computer experts use] in one place for easy reference.
Information is aggregated in specialized readers — or in some cases within email programs. There are many such readers. I use and highly recommend Google Reader.
WebWare has just posted an excellent introductory guide explaining how to use Google Reader. Google Reader is available online — one only needs to sign up to use it. WebWare’s guide explains how one can also download content into your computer for off-line browsing.
Within your Reader, you can review a list of article titles, along with the first few words of each article. If a title interests you, just click on it to “expand” the article. Another click on the headline will even take you to the blog or website, where you can read the full article and view its accompanying graphics. This system allows you to quickly identify only the articles of interest, while skipping over all those which do not interest you.
You can subscribe to our RSS Feed by clicking on an appropriate button in the sidebar to the right. Besides Google Reader, you can choose NetVibes, Bloglines, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and others to handle your feeds. Now’s a good time to get started.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
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