RSS and Blogs (Part 1)

Posted on February 17th, 2009 in RSS for Beginners

If you have had a blog for any amount of time you know that finding something to publish isn’t the most challenging part. You can have the greatest blog in the world but if no one ever sees it, it does little good. Because of that, I spent today promoting my blogs. Up to now I have focused on content, commenting on other blogs and sharing what I was doing with my friends in places like Facebook, Twitter and Tagfoot. Today was different because my blogs have enough substance now to form a personality of their own. It’s time to share them with the world via their RSS feeds.

What is RSS and where do I find it? RSS means Really Simple Syndication and most Wordpress blogs have it built right in. If your blog uses widgets, look to make sure the Meta widget is active in your sidebar. Once you have it working, look at it on your blog and you will see something that says RSS feed or entries RSS or entries feed or even comments RSS. You often have two, one for entries and another for comments. If you want to know what your feed address is, (in windows) you can right click on the link and copy the location and paste it into notepad. Alternatively, you can click it and on the page where you choose what to do with it they often show you what it is . If you have an RSS button on your blog, click it and do the same thing. It is usually your blog address with the word feed added to it. This blog’s feed address is http://gandree.info/feed/ .

Now that we know where it is found, what does it do? We’re all familiar with email and most of us subscribe to someone’s email list, well RSS is kind of the same thing for blog posts. You see, it’s nice to find a blog where someone is writing something you want to keep up with. The problem is that they might not post every day and none of us have time to constantly check for new posts . If you subscribe to someone’s RSS feed, whenever they post something it will automatically come to your reader. No more checking everybody’s blogs to see if they wrote something.

Ok, so how do I get it? There are many ways to read what is in a feed. You can have it sent to a program in your browser like Newsgator or Firefox (live bookmarks) or you can read it online with Newsgator or Google or My Yahoo! When you click on a RSS feed link, it takes you to a page where you can choose where you want it sent. For our purposes, we’ll assume you have a Google account (if not, you can sign up for free) and choose Google in the menu. Google gives you a choice. You can either have the feed sent to your Google homepage or your Google Reader. If you are new to all of this, have it sent to your Google Homepage. It will show up in a nice little page that you can visit whenever you want to check your blog feeds. Go ahead, play around with it.
If you add something that you really don’t want, you can always delete it. In fact, you will find that the feeds that help you today might not do anything for you a month from now. That’s fine as you will find new ones to replace them.

If you have so many feeds that they are filling up your Google Homepage, it’s time to move to Google Reader. The beauty of Google Reader is that you can collapse your feeds into just the headlines which lets you sift through a lot of feeds and only spend time on the ones you need to read. It’s great for doing research because you can actually gather Google search results and have them sent to your reader.

Now all of that’s great if people are finding your blog and subscribing to it’s feed but what if they don’t? You don’t have to wait for them to find you. There are sites that collect RSS feeds in a way that people can search them to find what they want. Many of them are looking for new feeds because let’s face it, if nobody posts anything, they have nothing to send their members. A good place to find sites to submit your RSS feeds to is RSS Mage – A current list of RSS feed directories. I’m sure there are many others but I have found that this one is easy to use and is a good place to start.

Next time we’ll talk about this some more and think about how RSS feeds affect our blogs. By the way, once you start using a RSS reader, you will see them everywhere. Even Flickr uses them and yes, you can have your feed sent to your reader. :0)

RSS & Blogs (Part 2)