Tame Your Technology - Computer Repair Zone

There are dozens of pieces of free RSS reader software available but I personally like Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) so in this article we’re going to have a look at how to use it.

Once you’ve signed for for a free account we can start to add RSS feeds to our feed reader account.

Many websites these days will either feature as RSS link or an orange RSS button like this one:

Clcik the link or button and you will either be taken straight to an RSS feed, or just as likely you will be taken to a page where you are provided with the RSS feed.

The feed address will look similar to a standard website address.

As an example, our RSS feed here at Tame Your Technology can be found at: http://www.tameyourtechnology.com/feed/

Once you have copied and pasted this address, you simply select the “Add Subscription” link in Google Feed Reader, enter in the feed address and click “Add”.

You will see the articles in the feed filling up the main window and you’ll see the feed name showing on the left hand side of the page.

Any site with some content you haven’t read will show in bold. Anything in normal text is stuff you’ve read. Every time you log into your Google Reader account it will check all the feeds to see what is new, and you can read it all there at that one central location without having to go and visit each site inidividually.

Simple!

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It seems many people are still uncertain of exactly what RSS is, so I thought I’d do my best to try and explain it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a technology that allows content to be syndicated - that is to legally appear elsewhere on the Internet.

Let’s look at an example.

This blog has an RSS feed, which is linked to in the navigation menu.

Another website or blog can take this RSS feed and add it to their web page.

In doing this, the articles from this blog would appear on their website.

As an example this can be useful for grabbing related news stories from the BBC or CNN websites and putting them on your website. A dog website can thus have the latest news stories related to dogs showing. A useful service for their visitors.

RSS is also free, so they wouldn’t pay to put those news stories on their website, and the BBC wouldn’t pay to have them featured on the dog site.

But there’s something else here. RSS is dynamic. When CNN updates their news with a new dog news story, the websites displaying that RSS feed would also automatically update with the latest news.

Now of course these days we can have RSS feed readers on our own computers or cell phones. You find a website or blog that you like that has an RSS feed, and type that RSS feed address into your RSS reader software.

Now whenever that website or blog adds new content, it will appear in your RSS software without you actually having to go to the website regularly to see if they’ve updated it.

It makes it easy to stay up to date with all your favorite sites and all the latest topics, news and information that matters to you personally, from one place.

That’s right - using your own RSS feed reader is like having your own personalised newspaper or magazine delivered to your computer every day. Nice, eh?

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