Do you know what an RSS feed is?

Do you know how to subscribe to one, and why you should bother? If not, read on…..

Very simply, an RSS feed is a means of delivering website content from one site to another, most commonly used to display the contents of many sites in one location, which is called aggregation. Practically, this means that you, the reader, can view the output of all of your favourite blogs in one place, without having to navigate to each in turn, by using something called a feed reader.

Why?

Lets say you have 10 blogs that you read regularly. This may mean you have 10 bookmarks in your browser that you have to click on in turn, and then wait for each website to load. It’s not uncommon to find that say, 3 have no new content, a couple may have a post you’re not interested in, and maybe another is currently unavailable, but you have had to wait for each one to load to find this out. If you were using a feed reader, all 10 blogs would have been presented to you on one page, you could instantly see that 3 of the blogs had not updated, you can still read the blog that is currently offline, because the content is saved in the feed reader, and you can read all of the others with virtually zero load time. What you do with the time saved is up to you – more blogs to read, or more time to spend on your own blog…

How To Subscribe To Feeds In 3 Easy Steps

There are many feed readers available, but I shall go with one of the most popular, Google reader.

1. You will need a free Google account, which you can get by being a Blogger or Gmail user. If you have one, go to step 2. If not, drop me a comment and I’ll send you a Gmail invite.
2. Go to the Google Reader homepage, and sign in with your Google account.
3. Click on ‘Add subscription’ as shown below, and in the box that opens, type in the URL of the blog you want to subscribe to: why not experiment with pasting this one in: http://blog-op.com

Click ‘Add’ and the feed will be automatically subscribed to. The great thing is, you don’t even need to know the exact URL of the site – just type in ‘Problogger’ for example, and Google Reader will offer a list of blogs for you to choose from. That’s all there is to it.

Add in as many blogs as you want,  don’t worry about finding where a blog’s feed is, or looking for the RSS symbol, as shown at the top of this post; as long as you have the name or URL Google Reader will do the rest. You can also arrange the feeds into folders that you name yourself, so you can keep your sports blogs separate from your news ones for example.

Using Google Reader

Next time you log on to the Reader, you’ll see a view not unlike this:

Which shows a random summary of post excerpts in the main window, and your list of blogs in the left column. Those blogs that are greyed out have no new posts since your last visit, whereas those in bold also have a number next to them to show you how many new posts there have been. Click on the blog name to see this:

The posts in white are unread, and obviously the remainder are ones you have already looked at. Typically the Reader will hold several hundred archived posts for each blog, which is a great fast way of exploring a blog’s archive, as well as proving a useful extra backup option for your own blog. As they are archived within the reader, you can still read the posts even if the blog has gone offline. Should you want to visit the blog, to make a comment for example, just click on the name of the post and you will be taken straight to it.

I find Google Reader to be an invaluable timesaver, and there’s no way I could read as many blogs as I do without it. Given the pressure on people’s time these days, along with the sheer number of fellow bloggers out there, it also pays to promote your own feed as well, to give more people a chance to read your blog.

RSS: Don’t blog without it!