A short introduction to RSS

I read over 100 blogs, on various topics. Some post daily. Some haven't posted in over a year and I'm hoping that the author will start posting again. How do I keep track of all of these posts? RSS. Basically, RSS will tell me when there is a new posting in a blog that I read. Let's have a look at how it can be used.

Suppose I want to see which blogs have been updated. How do I do this? With Internet Explorer 8 I click on Favorites on the top left of the browser, then the Feeds tab.




If you are running Internet Explorer 7, this is slightly different. Click on the orange star on the top left of your browser, then again the feeds heading.

Notice that some of the blog names are bold. This means that there are new postings for me to read. You'll notice as well that I have created different catergories for different blogs that I'm reading. By clicking on the bold text, I can read either the whole blog posting, or a short summary, depending on the settings the author has specified. This page is stored on my computer, which means it can be read when offline. By clicking on the links provided, I can go to either the individual blog posting on the blogs website or the home page for the blog, to see read the whole blog if I want.



It's pretty easy, and once you start with RSS, you may wonder how you managed before.

How do you set it up? Again, it's easy. When you're at a blog that you like, look for an orange symbol in the top right of your browser.




Click on the orange symbol, and you'll be taken to a page confirming you want to subscribe to the feed. Click on that link.




A dialog box will come up asking where you want to save it, you can create different folders for different subjects. For the moment, however, just click Subscribe and you're done.




That's it! Now probably once a day (depending on the settings) Internet Explorer will look for any updated posts in blogs you like reading. You can change the frequency of how often the browser looks for updates. Note that you probably shouldn't set it to very small time periods (like 15 minutes) as it costs the website owners a lot of money when many people do this. There are two ways: right click the blog name on the list in the RSS viewer or with the settings for Internet Explorer as a whole.

RSS has many uses, I've probably just scratched the surface here. One particularly useful thing to know about is when you want to track a particular news item.

Go to Google and click on News. Type in the details of the news item you're interested in. If it includes a name, put quote marks around the name and keep all the letters in lower-case.



Click on Search News. See how the results has a orange symbol? Just click it like before, and you'll have your own individual newsfeed on this subject.