Learning about RSS Feeds

I thought I understood RSS feeds until I started to write a newsletter about it. Come to find out I knew “RSS lite” which is also called Blog to Email. This is a relatively new feature that you can see on this blog (and sign up for!) right below the RSS feeds. Blog to email works by sending you an email every time there is new material posted to your favorite blog.

This contrasts with RSS feeds which function in a very different way. RSS Readers or Aggregators are actual software programs that install on your computer. They serve to find, retrieve and store the blog posts for you so you don’t have to revisit a blog everyday to get its new content. When you subscribe to a feed, you often have a toolbar at the top of the page with indicators for new and old content.

Here is a link to a 7.5 minute video about how to add RSS to your feed reader. My virtual assistant, Becki of Virtual Accuracy, made that video for me so I would understand how to get the info I wanted from blogs. You’ll have lots of your questions answered by her instructions.

There are a variety of readers to consider depending on your needs. Feed Demon is the name of a Newsgator feed that delivers RSS feeds to your desktop. You can also have the posts sent directly to your Outlook inbox with Newsgator or by using intraVnews. If you use Firefox as your internet browser, a great service is Wizz RSS which is an add-on. You can also use Google as your homepage and get your feeds delivered directly there. No matter which way to chose to get your blog contents sent to you, once your system is set-up, it is incredibly easy to stay on top of the information in your areas of interest.