What is RSS? How To Subscribe To This Site’s Feed and Get Immediate Updates

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to deliver the content of your site so that people don’t have to visit your site to view its contents. People read your content by subscribing to your feed in their favorite feed reader software. This has a number of advantages:

  1. People are notified immediately when your site is updated.
  2. It’s convenient - people that read a number of different news sources and sites can read them all in one place rather than have to visit each site individually.

How To View RSS content
Subscribing to an RSS feed is simple. I use an online reader called Bloglines.com, but if you have a Yahoo account, you can use that.

Bloglines - Set up a Bloglines account by visiting the site and clicking the “register” link at the top right side of the page. Then, set up your account by entering your email address, password, and preferences. You’ll be asked to check your email to confirm your subscription. Once you do, you can add a feed to your account by clicking on the “add” link on the left side of the page below the tab navigation. Enter the feed URL - like http://feeds.feedburner.com/SecretLawOfAttraction for this site - in the feed field. On the next screen, check the checkbox beside the feed then scroll to the bottom to subscribe.

Yahoo! - If you already have a Yahoo! Account, it’s easy to set up a feed. Go to My Yahoo! and click the “Add Content” link at the top just underneath the search box. On the next page, you’ll see a box that says “find content” with a text box and a button that says “find”. To the right of the “find” button, there’s a link that says “Add RSS by URL”. Click that and enter the feed URL - http://feeds.feedburner.com/SecretLawOfAttraction for this site - in the URL box and click the “add” button. Finally, confirm your subscription by clicking the yellow “Add to My Yahoo!” button. The site’s headlines now show up on your my Yahoo! Page.

Feed icon To add other sites to your account, when you’re browsing the web, look for either a link to an “RSS” or “XML” feed, or look for the orange feed icon (displayed on the left). Then, click on the icon to get the url of the feed.

30 Day Secret Experiment - Day 6: More Metrics and Writing Content said,

April 7, 2007 @ 10:19 pm

[…] I also signed up for a basic Feedburner account. Feedburner allows you to see how many people are subscribing to your feed - and how many people click through to your website. A typical RSS feed doesn’t do that. (Learn about RSS.) […]

Bradford Knowlton said,

April 20, 2007 @ 3:06 am

My experience has been that setting up the feedburner account, and then getting the feedburner plugin for wordpress makes it very easy. Also I have seen inside of feedburner the option to allow people to sign up for your feed via e-mail. So feedburner sends out the e-mails for you to all your subscribers.

Something to look into,
Bradford Knowlton
http://x86Virtualization.com

Krista said,

April 20, 2007 @ 8:31 am

There’s a feedburner plugin! Of course there would be :) Thanks for the tip. I’ll look into it.

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