RSS feed

Betsy, did you also check our RSS article ?

-- Martin, http://lumberjocks.com | My Facebook: http://profile.to/msojka

It stands for Real Simple Syndication but that is really immaterial. The beauty of it is this, if you have web sites, forums, blogs, etc that you check regularly to see if there is something new and the site, forum, blog has RSS capability you can use an RSS reader to check all of them for you and let you know if there has been new content added. You only need to have reader software on your computer and then subscribe to RSS feeds of the sites you want it to check for you. Then when you open your reader you can see a list of subscribed sites with updates. It’s super in my opinion. Very useful and time saving (or wasting as thge case may be). I mostly use the free Google RSS reader but Internet Explorer 7 has a simple one built in. To see it click on the Yellow STAR near the upper left hand corner of the IE window. That will pop down a little inset window which will display your FAVORITES. But you will notice near the top of that pop down are three choices: Favorites, Feeds, and History. Here’s the key – click on FEEDS and you will be looking at IE7’s RSS Reader. Syndicated sites provide FEEDS for readers to periodically check for updates. In the FEEDs list you may see nothing, or there may be a folder called MICROSOFT FEEDS. Open it and you may see their updates. Another important fact is that near the top right of IE7 is an icon which is for RSS feeds. It is between the House icon and the printer icon. If a particular site has RSS feeds available it will be orange colored just as it is when you are viewing Lumberjocks. If you want your reader to monitor this sight for updates, i.e. subscribe to the feed click the icon. It will then display the RSS feeds for the site. Near the top left click on “Subscribe to this feed” and presto that site will now appear in your IE7 Reader FEEDS. If the feed appears in bold print there is something new, if it is regular print there is nothing new since you last looked. Hope that wasn’t too overly technical and easy to follow. Try it – you’ll like it!

Betsy,

As said above, RSS is really a notification that something has been created or updated. For example, if you subscribe to the RSS feed of LJ projects, whenever someone posts a project, there would be a new entry in the feed. RSS feed readers, watch these feeds and tell you about these changes. It saves you from going to all the web sites that you are interested in and check for new information. The idea also applies to site updates, blog posts or forum topics.

There are many RSS readers but I like Google reader the most. You can also try a service called Bloglines. They are both completely free. Firefox also has a feature called Live Bookmarks. I like web based readers that don’t need you to install anything on your computer. You go to a web site to see all the RSS feeds and if you don’t like it, just don’t go there :)

RSS feeds is the only efficient way to keep track of what is happening out there.

HTH

-- Praki, Aspiring Woodworker

Others have said most of it, the thing I like is that many email clients nowadays can be RSS readers; I have new posts show up in folders in my mail reader and read ‘em just like messages on mailing lists.

-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke

Thanks Guys. Martin – I did not see your article to start with – thanks.

I’m going to try a few and see how I like it. From the sounds of the above – I think it will help my internet surfiing.

Thanks again!

-- You can't get a hug from Facebook.