Sharing 2 Learn & Learning 2 Share

RSS Feed is a fairly easy way to be notified about the update of content in someone’s blog, site, wiki, etc. We just need to subscribe to someone’s blog/site to receive the latest news at our “door step”. Well… not our real door step, but a personal space we can set up online .  These special places where the latest news will be delivered are called RSS feed Aggregators or RSS feed Readers, and we can get one for free.

Here is how it works….

First we create an account with an RSS Feed reader. There are many we can use for free, but my favourite is Google reader. [If you already have a gmail account, you will learn that you were automatically given a google reader account to.Simply log in to it by using your regular gmail user iD and password]

For more info about RSS feed we recommend you watch RSS Feed in Plain English by Common Craft.

Then, once you have your google reader in place, we just need to go to the sites we want to be notified about [= subscribe to] and add them to our google reader subscription list. To subscribe to the site we just need to copy and paste the link of the blog/website we chose and add it to the “add Subscription” box. (Please notice this is only for google reader; for other rss feed readers we might need to add the rss web address instead, which is explained below)

See this video tutorial to see how Google Reader works. 

Text/Picture Tutorial available here.

Finally, to see the latest news on your subscriptions visit your google reader often. Et Voilà! all your favourite sites will be compiled in one single spot!

Curiosity:

RSS Feeds are usually symbolized by the following icon:

This Icon is usually on the top of the page or at the bottom. Some web browsers all display it next to the web address of the site you are viewing. If you click on that icon you will get the RSS feed web address, which you can also copy and paste to your RSS reader – that’s just another way to get the RSS feed in your RSS Feed Reader!

If you want to know more about RSS, please vist the BBC website. They have good and clear information about it there too.