Do you use RSS Feeds?

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This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...

Image via Wikipedia

You’re busy and you need targeted information fast. Why chase it down when you can have it dropped on your digital doorstep?

I love feeds. I prefer them to email newsletters (I prefer to not mix personal email messages I’ve received with news and blog articles). Feeds are also more efficient than manually visiting my favorite websites to see if anything new has been posted. But if you aren’t using feeds, or maybe don’t understand them, I’ll give a brief introduction.

RSS translates into either of two accepted expansions. The older translation is Rich Site Summary while the newer and currently more common translation is Really Simple Syndication. See the Wikipedia entry for a more thorough discussion of the history of RSS. However you translate the abbreviation, the purpose is to provide publishers (websites) an easy way for subscribers (you) to get access to fresh web content.

If you want to use feeds you will first need a newsreader, also sometimes called an aggregator – it aggregates or gathers all of your feeds in one place and gives you tools to organize, manage and read the articles in your feeds. Possible readers you may already have access to include Microsoft Outlook and the Google Reader. There are others, both stand alone desktop software readers such as Feedreader and web based readers such as Feedly, an extension for FireFox and Chrome – it links to your Google Reader account. If you have a Gmail account you already have access to Google Reader.

Once you have chosen and configured your reader, you need to find the feeds that interest you and subscribe to them. Look for the RSS feed icon. It should look similar to the image at the beginning of this article (but much smaller).

Clicking on the feed icon or the feed link will do one of two things. If you are lucky (if the publisher has installed the programming code behind the scenes) you will be taken to a window where you can add the feed to your reader. I’m going to show you how to do this using a feed from the Sage ACT! Knowledgebase. See the orange icon next to the count of answers available? Click on the icon.

ACT! KB Search form with feed icon

You should see a subscription page.

Subscription page for ACT! KB

The page defaults to feedly, my preferred reader. But I can choose other readers by clicking the drop down.

Select your feed reader from drop down

If you have followed these instructions for the ACT! KB you will now be subscribed to new KB articles. If you did a search first, the subscription should be specific for your search terms. Whenever a new or updated article on that topic is posted, you will automatically receive it in your reader.

I told you that one of two things might happen if you clicked on a feed link or icon. I just described the preferred result. But sometimes instead of seeing a nice subscription page which allows you to very easily add the feed to your reader you will see something like this:

Example of RSS XML

What is that? It’s the XML information in the feed. If you see this, hit the back button on your browser to take you back to the link or icon you had clicked on. Now right click on the feed and select “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) or “Copy Link Address” (Google Chrome) or “Copy Shortcut” (IE). You can now paste the link into the appropriate location of your reader to subscribe to the feed. Or, you may be able to subscribe from your browser’s toolbar.

I’ll cover using readers, including different ways to subscribe in a future post.

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About Dan Sissors

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