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What is RSS?
And why should
you care?
Good questions. First, here’s why you should care.
Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS
feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control.
How?
You don’t have to put your email address on a newsletter
list. When you subscribe to the RSS feed by putting in
your email address, your email address stays private in
the RSS program and we don’t even see it.
If you want to stop receiving content, you don’t have to
request to be “taken off the list.”
One click and poof… the subscription is gone.
Plus, since there’s no email list involved, there’s no
way a publisher can sell, rent or give away your email
to anyone else.
That’s right… no more spam, viruses, phishing, or
identity theft. And best of all, no reason to put
yourself at the mercy of the publisher’s intentions.
By subscribing to the RSS feed, you won’t need to suffer
through the legalese in the privacy policy (if there is
one) looking for loopholes that will fill your inbox
with junk.
Again, if you don’t like the content, you can make it
disappear as fast as you can change a TV channel…with
just one click.
Awesome, huh?
That is great!
Umm… So what is RSS?
Alright! Now let’s go over RSS.
RSS is a simply an Internet technology allowing busy
people to receive updates from the blogs and web sites
of their choice and interest.
Here is the essence of an RSS feed — you subscribe and
then you automatically receive in your feed reader the
new content that is posted to the blog.
You may already be using a feed reader, and not even
realize it.
If you have a personalized home page like My Yahoo or My
MSN, you are using RSS. That’s how content that you pick
— like news topics, weather or quotes of stock you are
interested in — appears on your personal page. You can
also add content from any blog or other site that uses
RSS to provide updates.
If you use the Firefox browser, you can receive RSS
feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks
function. You can also receive RSS feeds from the tool
bar of Internet Explorer 7.0.
There are also desktop-based feed readers that function
like an email program such as Newsgator or Feed Demon.
If this all sounds complicated, it’s really not.
RSS can give you the same convenience of email
subscription, without any of the spam-like experiences
of giving out your email address to potentially
unscrupulous characters.
Sounds good. So how do you subscribe to a RSS
feed?
Look for subscription or feed options on the blogs you
are interested in. You might see a variety of colorful
buttons called “chicklets,” which are links to RSS feed
services (usually free services). Or you might see a box
that allows you to put your email address in and
subscribe to the feed right at the blog.
Keyboard Culture Blog Community offers you both.
If the site you want to subscribe to uses RSS Feeds
(like Keyboard Culture Blog Community and many other
popular sites), you’ll likely see the standard RSS icon,
which takes you to a page that will give you a selection
of the most popular feed readers so you can pick yours.
This is the new standard RSS icon:
Sometimes there will be a chicklet for your particular
reader right on the blog that will take you to the
appropriate subscription page. You may see these (among
others):
Finally, you may also see little orange buttons that say
XML or RSS. Often these chicklets will take you to a
page that looks like code gibberish. In this case, you
simply cut and paste the page URL from your browser
window and manually paste it into your feed reader
subscription box.
Hopefully this last method will soon disappear, never to
be seen again.
Summary: RSS feeds solve BIG problems.
RSS is being accepted at a rapid rate, because it’s a
good for everyone.
The benefit to you is obvious. And it’s good for blog
publishers too, because we want to make sure that people
feel comfortable subscribing, and that our message is
delivered and not deleted by overzealous spam filters.
If there’s anything here that is confusing, or you have
a question, please email us and I’ll be happy to help!
Bloggers: Would you like to use this
tutorial on your blog?
You’re free to use it word for word or change it to meet
your needs. If you would link back to Keyboard Culture
Blog Community to say “thanks,” that would be great.
Here’s a suggested acknowledgement:
“Thanks to
Keyboard Culture Blog Community for a helping hand
with this RSS mini-tutorial.”
Here is a listing of some more popular RSS Feed
Readers. If you do not see your favorite feed reader website or
if you are using a desktop feed reader the url for this
blog's feed is
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PatriciaSherman-HealingIsPossible
Add to your Favorite Social Bookmarking
site...
What is social
bookmarking?
In a social
bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet
resources that they find useful. These lists are either
accessible to the public or a specific network, and
other people with similar interests can view the links
by category, tags, or even randomly.
They also
categorize their resources by the use of informally
assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. Most social
bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks
which are associated with given "tags", and rank the
resources by the number of users which have bookmarked
them.
Its increasing
popularity and competition have extended the services to
offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating,
commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes,
reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed
subscription, web annotation, create groups and social
networks.
Listed below are some of the most
popular social bookmarking sites. To add this blog
simply click on the icon. If you do not see your
favorite social bookmarking website the url for this
blog's is
http://www.keyboard-culture-healing-is-possible.com
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