KirstenL4W

No, I’m not trying to make you eat anything.  I just had dinner myself, so I don’t really want to think about food right now.  I want to talk about technical stuff.

Yesterday I went and did a few updates to my site, mostly revolving around my RSS Feed.  I put the link to my feed on every page, and put a bit of text with the button on this page you are reading now (unless you’re reading from a feed reader already, in which case you know what this post is about).   So for those who don’t know, let me tell you about what a feed is.  Did you notice the weird blue button on the right?  The one that looks like this?

That is what is known as an RSS subscription button.  Usually you see them in orange, but I’m not a fan of orange, and Snoskred made a whole bunch of really pretty ones, so I used one of hers instead.  But that icon, no matter what color you see it in, means that you can subscribe to a blog or website.  You’ll also see a lot of talk about RSS, which means Really Simple Syndication.  In the simplest terms, RSS is technical jargon that means you can get a subscription to your favorite blog or website.  Everyone is familiar with subscriptions.  You probably have a subscription to the local newspaper and maybe a few magazines.  Subscriptions are pretty cool because it means that what you want to read comes to you when it’s ready, so you don’t have to waste your time going to get it.  Magazines, newspapers, and other print materials like that come out on a schedule so even if you didn’t have a subscription, you’d pretty much know when to go get the latest issue.

Blogs and other online articles might not publish on a regular schedule, so going to get the latest posts can be an effort in futility at times.  I know - I’ve done it.  As I started blogging more and finding other blogs that I wanted to read, I realized that it took a lot of my precious time to visit each blog or website individually to see if there was anything new.  I wanted the new stuff to come to me, because it would save me so much time.  So I asked around, and found out there is a way to get what I want: it’s called a Feed Reader.So, just like the latest issue of Vogue is delivered to your mailbox, feed readers are a sort of collection box for your blog subscriptions, where all the latest posts stay until you go to read them, all in one handy place.  There are lots of readers out there, and I use Google Reader.  It’s the first one that I tried, since I already used Google quiet a bit, and it’s worked very well for me.  Another popular reader is Bloglines.

Now, every day I can go to my reader and see exactly how many new posts there are, and it shows me the posts so I can read them.  It certainly saves me a lot of time, and I don’t lose track of where I was.  I don’t miss anything.

What if you don’t want to use a reader?  Well, it’s not as popular as being able to subscribe in a reader, but there are plenty of blogs that offer email subscriptions so that the latest posts go directly to your email.  I offer it.  I do it because I want to make it easy for you to read my blog.  If your favorite blog doesn’t offer email subscriptions, then contact them or leave a comment asking about it.  If they offer a feed, it’s very easy to offer it by email as well.

I’m sure you want to know how all this way cool internet subscription stuff is possible.  Well, the most popular way by far is to use Feedburner.  They make it easy - pretty much all you have to do is tell them what your blog address is, and they give you the code for a basic orange feed icon and tell you how to put it on your blog.  They also let you offer email subscriptions and even that way cool thing that tells you how many readers a blog has.  It’s all pretty easy, and it certainly makes the experience of blogging and reading blogs so much more fun!

Now that you know how feeds work, click on the big blue button above.  You know you want to!

Other Posts Like Me:

• Blogging Mistakes - Posting Too Soon
• Getting the Word Out
• What Makes a Personal Blogger Worth Reading?
• I’m A Follower
• About Pages for Personal Bloggers

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