RSS | Subscription feeds– what are they and how can they help me?

In much the same way as you subscribe to a paper magazine subscription, internet subscription feeds are designed to give you regular updates on content as it is released. This is great if you find you want to stay on-top of content from many websites, but don’t have the time to visit lots of sites on a regular basis. Subscription feeds grab the latest content for you and suck it to a centralised point where you can decide from the title and introductory blurb whether or not you are going to invest the time required to read the entire article.

Watch the video below for an explanation

Where can I read RSS feeds?

The best way to read your RSS feeds is to use a web based news reader like reader.google.com or gregarius.net.  As an alternative, many personalised home pages allow you to add RSS feeds straight onto your homepage. Google reader is the most popular web based RSS reader out there so this tutorial focuses on showing you how to add an RSS feed to Google Reader.

Google Reader.

Firstly, visit reader.google.com and either sign in using your existing Google account or sign up for a new one. Once you’re in the reader you will see a screen that looks something like this:

We’d recommend “taking the tour” to learn a little more about Google reader but you can jump straight to the next steps if you’re pressed for time.

Let’s say, for example, that today you wanted to subscribe to a specific feed from the New York Times (www.nytimes.com). To do this, open a new browsing window or tab (leaving Google Reader where it is) and visit www.nytimes.com. Once there, look around the web page for a Subscribe or RSS icon. We found it all the way down the bottom of the site in the footer. Left click on the icon.

As the New York Times is such a large website with content on so many topics, subscribing to all of them could get overwhelming. To prevent this they have conveniently broken up the site into categories such as news, features, additional feeds and opinion pieces. As you can see, within each category there are subsets to break the information down even further.

To subscribe to a feed, right click on the RSS icon next to the topic that interests you. Once you have right clicked, select Copy Shortcut if you are using Internet Explorer or Copy Link Location if you are using Mozilla Firefox. Next, swap over to your Google Reader browser window or tab.

Once you have Google reader in front of you, left click on the text Add Subscription link on the left of the window. Click in the text box that appears and press CTRL+V (or right click in the text box and left click “Paste”). Click Add.

You will see that a NY Times feed is added to the list and you will start to see unread items in the main viewing window. You can repeat this step as many times as you require to add feeds for your favourite websites.

Reading the full thing

Depending on what has been set up by the content creator, the RSS feeds you subscribe to will display part of an item or sometimes even the whole thing. Regardless, you may want to view an item on the host’s website. Each item displayed in Google Reader is linked back to a page on the content provider’s website and left clicking on the blue heading of an item will take you to the original item.

Adding an RSS feed to your personalised homepage

Adding an RSS feed to your personalised homepage is a great way to juice it up a little. If you use iGoogle, adding an RSS feed is as easy as clicking on Add Stuff and then using the link to Add Feed or Gadget on the left hand side of the page.