Using RSS News Readers

I get a lot of blank stares from my friends outside the web publishing world when I mention RSS feeds and news readers, etc. So I thought I would post some information on what news readers are, and how to use them.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and provides you with a way of staying up to date with news and alerts throughout the week without the necessity of visiting the particular sites. You can view updated headlines from your various feeds through your RSS reader.

So what is an RSS reader? In its most basic sense, it is a tool that aggregates various news sources into one web page or screen. There are many free and inexpensive readers available.

Here are a few of the more popular readers:

Pluck
Newscrawler
NewsGator

My personal favorite is Google's reader.

There are plenty of others. To find them, just visit Google, Yahoo or your favorite search engine and look up "RSS reader aggregator." After you set up your RSS reader, you can start subscribing to RSS feeds. To subscribe to my site, just copy the location (URL) of the service below:

http://sockmoney.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Then follow the instructions for your particular news reader, and paste this URL wherever it asks for the location of the service you wish to subscribe to.

So how do you know if a particular site offers an RSS feed? Visit their homepage and look for (and click on) one of the following icons:



Most sites will include instructions, but if not, just remember that all you need to do is copy and paste the feed URL (formatted like the one above, or often with the extension of .xml or .rss) into your news reader.