How To Subscribe To A News Feed

Subscribing to news feeds helps you stay up-to-date with new content written for web sites. When you subscribe to one of my news feeds, you get automatically notified whenever I add or update a web page on my web site. In other words, subscribing to news feeds makes updates come to you instead of forcing you to come back here in order to check for new updates. Here’s how it works.

What is a news feed?

Every time I update my web site, I make changes to several pages. One of these pages is the news feed page. The news feed page is just like every other page except that it has a list of all the recent updates I’ve made to my site.

How can I use your news feed to get notified of updates?

Even though news feeds are just like web pages, they are meant to be accessed by special software called feed readers (or news readers). If you access a news feed from your regular browser, it doesn’t always work. So the first step to using news feeds is obtaining a feed reader that you like.

Choose a Feed Reader

There are several different kinds of feed readers. Most of them are either desktop feed readers or web-based feed readers. If you choose a desktop feed reader you’ll probably have to install it. If you choose a web-based feed reader you’ll probably have to create an account to start using it. Here are some feed readers I’ve used myself and have heard good things about from others:

Add the Feed to the Feed Reader

Once you’ve chosen a feed reader you like, the next step is to add my news feed page to the feed reader so it can go and fetch updates. If the news reader you chose knows how to handle the feed: protocol (or if it’s smart enough to recognize a news feed when it sees one), simply go to my list of news feeds and click on the little feed icon (Subscribe to this feed.) next to the one(s) you want to add to your feed reader. (This process of adding feeds to a feed reader is called subscribing.) Clicking this button will open the feed in your feed reader, giving you the option of adding my feed to your list of subscriptions.

If your feed reader doesn’t recognize the feed: protocol, you’ll have to add the news feed of your choice manually. Each feed reader does this in a slightly different way, though all of them offer help if you get stuck. In general, you copy the news feed page’s URL (or web address) and paste it into the subscribption box of the feed reader.

You find the news feed page’s URL by clicking on the name of the feed, which will take you to the news feed page, and then looking at your web browser’s address or location bar (which might look something like http://maymay.net/blog/feed/). It is this address that you need to copy into your news reader.

Now that I have your news feed, when will I be notified of updates?

Your news reader (or feed reader) will automatically notify you of any updates to your subscriptions when it is open.

The advantage of using a news reader really shows when you want to check more than one site for updates. Without a news reader, you would have to visit each site and search through it for content you have not already seen to find updates. With a news reader, you can simply open your news reader and it will tell you about all the changes on all the sites you have subscribed to.

Do you have any extra tips?

:) Always.

It’s a good idea to check your news reader regularly, about as often as you check email.

If you’re new to news feeds, I recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird as your news reader because in addition to being a news reader, it is also an extremely good email program. Most people already have a good habit of checking their email, so if you use Mozilla Thunderbird, you can check both your email and your news feed subscriptions in one place.

A good way to jump-start using news feeds is to subscribe to a news site that offers a news feed (such as CNN or Google News) so you can get the latest headlines in your news reader. The point is to put at least two or three subscriptions in your news reader so you instantly experience the benefit. It doesn’t make any sense to use a news reader for only one subscription.

Many, many sites offer news feeds these days. Wherever you see a little RSS, XML, or “News Feed” link on a page, click on it to see if the link goes to a news feed page. If it does, you can put that feed into your news reader.