RSS Article Addendum 1: How to Get Going
An RSS article reader thinks I didn’t give an adequate discription of what to do to subscribe to a feed. He was inspired by my article and wanted to get going with RSS, but wasn’t sure what to do to get started.
In order to receive RSS feeds, there are three things you need to do:
- If you don’t already have a news reader, you need to get one.
- You need to find a feed you want to subscribe to.
- You need to subscribe to the feed.
A sidebar in the article lists some news readers and highlights about them. That could be a good starting point to choose an aggregator. There are also other lists on the Web, too. The sidebar also has a few things to consider when choosing an aggregator.
Once you have a news reader, you need to subscribe to some feeds. First, you need to find some feeds. Many blogs and news sources that offer feeds indicate that on the site somewhere. Look for text like “add headlines to your site,” XML, or “subscribe to this site” or an orange button with XML on it. The article mentions search engines specializing in blogs and feeds, like Feedster and Syndic8. Check some of your favorite sources to see they offer feeds. Another great way to find feeds is to investigate the blogs and sources the ones you read point to. Talk to your colleagues to learn what feeds they subscribe to. The article mentions how you can create feeds for sources that don’t have feeds.
When you figure out what you want to subscribe to and locate the feed, you can subscribe to the feed. How to subscribe to a feed varies from aggregator to aggregator. I only use two different aggregators, so I’m not familiar with how to subscribe to feeds in different news readers. A few aggregators come with a list of popular feeds to make it easy for people to subscribe to some of the feeds. Some news readers have you enter the URL of the feed in order to subscribe to the feed. You should be able to get the URL of the feed from where you found the feed–the XML button or the link to the feed. The URLs often end in .xml or .rdf.
Clear as mud, right?
