If you’ve spent any time at all on my site, you’ve noticed that after every article, and in other various places on my site, I offer people the ability to sign up for an RSS feed. Now, up until just a few months ago when I started this site, I didn’t even know what an RSS feed was, my husband had to explain it to me. If you’re not real technically savvy, and are wondering just what an RSS feed is, then let your wondering mind come to a screeching halt. I’m going explain just what an RSS feed is in terms everyone can understand, and let you know why it can be so beneficial to you. Plus, you’ll know what people are talking about when they refer to signing up for an RSS feed.
First of all, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Yes, I checked, that’s really what it stands for. Syndication for the web, defined by Wikipedia is web feeds which make a portion of a web site available to other sites or individual subscribers. Simply put, when you go to a website, such as mine, and sign up for the RSS feed, you are basically signing up to be on the automated update list. That means whenever an article is posted to my site, you will receive a copy of it in your favorite feed reader, to make sure that you won’t miss a thing. What’s a feed reader you ask? It is software that is used to track multiple feeds, in one locale. For example, if you go to bloglines.com and sign up for a free account, you will have the ability to track several feeds from various websites, enabling you to track all your favorite blogs from a single page. Nice, huh?
Now, there are several different choices with regard to available feed readers. If you look just to the side of the big orange button on the side of this post, you will see an icon for Bloglines, Add to Google, My Yahoo, Newsgator and My AOL. If you click on one of the icons, it will take you to a page that will allow you to add my feed to the designated choice. Because I use Yahoo for my email service, I like to have my email and my feeds accessible on the same page, therefore, I would click on the My Yahoo icon, and follow the directions to add the feed to my Yahoo email account. Once completed, when I login to Yahoo, I now can click on the Feed called “Wedding Help”, and view all the most up-to-date content from the site in real time. I can do this again and again for any site that is RSS enabled, and view lots of different feeds very easily and quickly, without having to remember a bunch of different web addresses. Cool!
What if using a feed reader is not your style? You may also utilize standard email. After you click on the big orange button, you will have the option to choose to have the new posts delivered directly to your email once per day, as long as there has been a new article posted by the authors to the website. To use this option, click on the big orange button, and on the next screen, choose “Get Wedding Help delivered by email”, enter your email address and verification, and you’re off and running.
RSS feeds have mainly become popular with blogging sites, and is starting to spread to other parts of the internet as well. It’s thought by many that RSS feeds will become more and more popular in the years to come once people start realizing how easy it is to get your favorite site’s new articles to come straight to you. Not only does it cut down on time you spend surfing looking for your favorite articles, but it also helps you easily stay abreast of everything you want to know.
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Tags: RSS feed