Week 2 #3 - Blogging - Why and how would you subscribe?

So you've found quite a few interesting blogs in the past few weeks and you want to keep up with the articles but you don't want to visit each blog every day to read them. What can you do?

Give yourself a pat on the back if you said subscribe!

Each blog has a feed which contains a title and description. Software or applications such as feed aggregators/feed readers can collect and organise these feeds and display updated articles from the bogs (or even some web pages).

Wikipedia explain aggregators/feed readers quite well:

"Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator


Examples of the aggregators or feed readers include Google Reader (to which you already have access if you have a Blogger blog), Bloglines, Rojo. Even Firefox and later versions of Internet Explorer have built-in feed readers.

How do people advertise that their pages have a feed? They use a little orange broadcast symbol such as the one in my sidebar or they might use the terms subscribe and RSS or Atom. If I click on the orange subscribe symbol in my sidebar I'm taken to the Feed. I can select my reader from the list.




For more information on subscribing to blogs, please check out my blog help page on the Eastern Regional Libraries website.

Next up I'll show you how to advertise your feed.

Cheers, webgurl