RSS Syndicated Feeds

WARNING: This arti­cle is only rec­om­mended for NON-web savvy dumb bun­nies like me. (How­ever, the rest of you might well find our dumb­ness slightly enter­tain­ing. Read on at your own risk of being bored.)

A few years ago, some­one made a post on a blog­ging site about how excit­ing was the whole con­cept of RSS feeds. The gen­eral overview of that post pre­sented it in such a way that it sounded easy and excit­ing so I down­loaded a feed reader and pre­pared myself to be wowed. Trou­ble was, that gen­er­al­ized pre­sen­ta­tion of RSS feeds didn’t tell me how to USE the darn thing once I got it. I installed it in my browser, but WHERE IS IT? How do I USE it? I have over the years since, asked a cou­ple of peo­ple suc­cess­fully using RSS feeds how it worked but the way they tried to explain it was not clear to my befud­dled brain. It seemed they had trou­ble with the whole con­cept that I actu­ally NEEDED an expla­na­tion of some­thing that to them, was absurdly sim­ple. I came to the con­clu­sion that I was sim­ply too dumb to com­pre­hend it, much less use it. I was unable to fig­ure all this out in a mat­ter of min­utes, so as with most things that might require the read­ing of direc­tions and some patience, I quickly became dis­in­ter­ested and moved on to things less chal­leng­ing. The world of Inter­net con­tent syn­di­ca­tion went on with­out me, though I’ve con­tin­ued to be secretly jeal­ous that I could not a part of it.

Hav­ing recently suc­cess­fully tack­led the build­ing of 2 web­sites and hav­ing effec­tively learned all man­ner of tech­ni­cal magic tricks that I was once con­vinced was well beyond my capa­bil­i­ties to absorb, I’ve gained some sem­blance of raw courage in tack­ling intim­i­dat­ing tech­nol­ogy. So I revis­ited the whole idea of RSS feeds. In my own crawl­ing of the Inter­net search­ing out infor­ma­tion to add to my newly acquired genius, I’ve found count­less web­sites that I’d LOVE to keep up with. I knew just enough about the con­cept of RSS feeds to under­stand that this is pre­cisely what feeds are for. It’s like hav­ing your own reg­u­larly updated online “news­pa­per” if you will, con­tain­ing all the newest con­tent from your favorite web­sites that you have sub­scribed to, all col­lected in one list on one page. It has come to the point that I can no longer afford to cave under the pres­sure of my own impa­tience and dumb­ness. I sim­ply MUST get a work­ing knowl­edge of how to avail myself of the ben­e­fits of web syndication.

Enter my beloved Google. To me, Google is an Inter­net GOD, the Holy Father of the Inter­net Trin­ity, the Inter­net Ancient of Days. Google makes every­thing absurdly easy for the dumb­est of the dumb.

So I revis­ited the pages I wanted to keep up with. I scoured each page for the feed “sub­scribe” but­ton, then clicked it (almost EVERY web­site that knows even the slight­est thing about what they are doing now has a “sub­scribe” button…if they don’t, shame on them). Here’s what they might look like:

When you click on most of these but­tons, you are then given a choice of feed reader pref­er­ences, often pre­sented in the form of var­i­ous brightly col­ored but­tons. Since Google is my own per­sonal Inter­net Sav­ior, I chose the Google feed reader but­ton, which took me to a page that invited me to install the Google reader. If given the choice between sub­scrib­ing to Posts or Replies, click either you would be inter­ested in keep­ing up with. For me, I just usu­ally stick to postings.

Then I go back to my favorite pages, hit the lit­tle orange but­ton again, select the Google reader icon again. I’m taken now to my very own Google page con­tain­ing my feeds. At the top of the page is a but­ton to click that will add a ’sub­scrip­tion’ to the selected website’s updates to my Google feeds, which now show up in a lit­tle side­bar box on the left hand side of my page. I high­light the address of this feed page in my browser’s address bar, drag it to my browser’s menu bar and now I have only to hit a but­ton at the top of my browser bar to go instantly to my feed page to see what’s new on all my favorite web­sites and blogs!  I can click on one of the feeds I have sub­scribed to and I get a page of titles to their lat­est updates. HOW COOL IS THIS?!@!@#$%^&&^%!!!!!!!?!

Now I can quickly and eas­ily STAY well informed with timely infor­ma­tion and enter­tain­ment from all my favorite sources. Once again, I have PROVEN the valid­ity of the claim that you can INDEED suc­cess­fully teach an old dog new tricks. Arf arf…I’ve earned a treat. CLICK HERE FOR FEED 101 and learn more about RSS feeds from Google, the Holy Father of all things Inter­net, and you TOO can learn a handy dandy new trick that will make you smart like me. Heh.

By the way, don’t you DARE leave here with­out hit­ting MY sub­scribe but­ton. You know darn well your life will be greatly improved and so much more worth liv­ing with a steady stream of my non­sense deliv­ered to your own per­sonal feed page. My own ‘sub­scribe’ but­ton resides at the bot­tom right hand cor­ner of every page. OR you can hit the link imme­di­ately fol­low­ing this post that invites you to “sub­scribe.” Just DO it.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sub­scribe to my RSS feed!