How to subscribe to an RSS feed

How to subscribe to an RSS feed- with screenshots

Lydia Taylor April 4th, 2007

Some of our readers may have noticed that funny icon and the text ‘posts’ located in the upper right corner of our web pages. What is that thing anyway? Well, that symbol indicates an RSS Feed.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a way to push content from a website using feeds to a RSS ‘aggregator’ of your choice. With feeds, you can consolidate content from your favorite websites, right to your desktop, without going to each of those sites to see if they’ve added new articles!

RSS is best described as a way to build your own electronic newspaper, where all the articles are sent to you digitally, and you get to pick the article sources.

The Elegant Augusta GA Real Estate Blog offers two types of feeds- you can ‘feed on posts’ which are articles like you are reading now, or you can ‘feed on comments’ which lets you read comments posted with a particular article. This last type of feed can be useful if you’ve posted a question as a comment and wish to be notified when they are new comments, or perhaps there is an interesting discussion going on that you want to follow.

If you are thinking, “OK, that sounds great, but how do I use an RSS feed?” please read on, because that’s what I want to show you!!

The first think you need to do is decide which RSS aggregator you want to use. (Ok, thats just geek-speak. Lets call it an RSS Reader because thats what it is.) The choice of RSS Reader can be confusing because there are hundreds of them out there. Some work only for Macs, some for Windows… For the purpose of this walkthrough, I’ll use Google Reader, which is a platform-independent RSS Reader, and will work on any computer.

If you don’t have a Google Account, you’ll be asked to sign up. Most of us already have a Google account, so sign in if you haven’t already.

Once you are signed in -if you are new to Google Reader- then you will end up on a page like this:

OK, now that we are signed in, we need to add some feeds. See those options along the left side of the page? If you click on add subscription you can type in a direct link to a feed or search for it. If you choose to browse, Google will show you popular feeds to pick from, or you can choose packages of feeds on popular topics:

Google Reader subscriptions

The post feed for this website is http://www.northofthesavannah.com/feed/ if you wish to enter that now.

Once you’ve pointed Google Reader toward a feed, it will automatically load in the latest content from the feed:

Some feeds give you additional options such as sending an interesting article to a friend:

Once you’ve tried out RSS you’ll find it’s a great way to read your favorite web sites all in one place, and since Google Reader keeps tabs on the feeds, you get to read your articles as soon as they go on-line.

Many major web browsers also have integrated RSS readers, and will even tip you off if there is a feed on the website you are viewing:

Internet Explorer 7 Feed Icon
Firefox feed icon