January 13, 2005
Tired of Checking for Blog Updates
I have had about 2 or 3 conversations over the past week where I told people to just “add that feed to your news aggregator” and they responded “what?”. These were people that I expected to be down with this lingo but they weren’t. So I decided to publish a little how to here to help all ya all. There are probably 100 other ones out there but this is my version.
One of the hidden beauties of blogs is the fact that they can be syndicated. Syndication is a big word that mean that you can share content in a format that others can use. This allows you to use software called readers to read the content. Sort of like how you use an e-mail client to read your e-mail. The content is presented to you in a nice orderly format. When new content is available, you see it — kinda like when you get a new e-mail. The end result is that the information that you subscribe to comes to you when it becomes available, which saves you time!
If you are on Windows, I suggest RSS Bandit. It is free. I use it. RSS Bandit comes prepopulated with a bunch of subscriptions to feeds to get you started. You can unsubscribe to them if you don’t like them.
The next step is to start adding all the feeds that you might be interested in. When you visit a blog or web site and you see one of the buttons below, it is giving you a link to the syndication feed that you can put into your reader. Once you subscribe, your reader will watch your feeds for new content and alert you to what is new.
So end your daily search for new information by having it come straight to you! Trust me, you will dig it.
