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A Beginners Guide to Quickly Finding Content for your Blog - using RSS Feeds by Julieanne

1) Overview

2) What is an RSS Feed?

3) What is an Aggregator?

4) How to Set up a Web Based Aggregator: Google Home Page

5) Why offer RSS feeds to your Readers?

1) Overview

This article will demonstrate a very easy way to review Fresh Content on Topics of your choice, from a large number of web sites in a very short time.

This Fresh Content is accessible by using technologies called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and an Aggregator. These sound complicated, and they are NOT. They are REALLY simple, and I’ll demonstrate how simple they are.

2) What is an RSS feed?

RSS is a type of file format (called XML) used to syndicate summaries of web content from news websites and weblogs (among other things too). These syndications are sent to other Websites to keep people up to date with news relevant to what they want.

The technology behind RSS allows internet users to subscribe to those websites with an RSS feed. The RSS feed is a special URL (web address) which Internet Users can copy. Unlike subscriptions to pulp-based newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.

An Example of an RSS feed

There is a popular website for Technology news, called CNET. They put up fresh articles on this website every day and thousands of people read the articles.

They have provided an RSS Feed so that Internet readers can subscribe a summary of the headlines of their news items. Whenever a new article is posted on their website, all subscribers are notified. The title of the article and a brief summary, with a link back to the article is displayed on all subscribers websites.

View the RSS Feed on CNET News

Scroll right down to the bottom right side of the CNET News website. You will see a little orange button labelled XML and to the left of that button, a link labelled “All RSS Feeds”. The orange button labelled XML can be found on many websites. That button gives Internet readers access to the RSS feed from that website. Sometimes, there is no button, and just a link to RSS feeds. The button and the Link do the same thing.

If you click on the orange button, you’ll see some “gobbledegook” kind of computer language. This is the computer language (called XML) that describes the summary of the News information on that page. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know that language, or even look at it.

What’s important to Internet Readers, is the actual summary from the CNET News website. Once subscribed, you will see a short list of Article Headings, something like this (only the headings will be clickable links back to the CNET News site.

_________________________________________________

CNET News.com
_________________________________________________
Supreme Court won’t review Micorsoft Patent appeal
Steve Case resigns from Time Warner board
Sprint dials into music

The headlines are displayed, along with a link back to the site, for easy access to that section of news.

The REAL VALUE of the RSS Feed Subscriptions
The real value in this, is that you can have hundreds of these syndications from all different News sites, on the one web page (or in an application on your own computer). Each day, you can glance at the headings of every topic you have an interest in.

The subscriptions can be edited, deleted or removed, added to at any time. They are all under your control.

3) What is an Aggregator?

The Aggregator is the application used to display the Heading Summaries from the RSS Feeds. It displays a consolidated view of the content on a Web page.

For the Internet Reader, that view of the content is displayed on a single Web Page (within a Web Browser) or in a desktop application.

Aggregators are also known as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators or news readers.

There are 3 main types of Aggregators:
1. Desktop
2. Web-based.
3. Mobile Phone.

1. Desktop Aggregators
There are many good Desktop Aggregators. Two recommended ones, which cost a little are:

FeedDemon for Windows.

NetNewsWire for Mac OS.

There are many other Free Desktop readers available. Do a Search in Google for RSS Reader and you’ll find some Free Desktop Aggregators.

Desktop Aggregators may have more features and a slightly higher performance compared to the Web-based Aggregators.

A Desktop Aggregator is more like an email application such as Outlook, where the RSS feeds are collected and sent to the Aggregator on your computer. So, all the summaries are stored on your computer, and displayed in a similar format to the way email is often displayed.

2. Web Based Aggregators
Choosing between a Web Based and a Desktop Aggregator is personal choice, rather like choosing between a web based or desktop email application.

4) How to Set up a Web Based Aggregator: Google Home Page

A Web Based Aggregator is an online service, with the advantage that you can access your RSS feeds from anywhere you have Internet access, and upgrades of new features are added automatically.

I’m going to provide some instructions here, for how to set up the Google Home Page, to use as an Aggregator so your RSS Feeds can all be displayed on one Web page.

There are many other very good Web Based Aggregators, and I encourage you to look at them too. My Yahoo! is another good one. There is a list of Free Web Based Aggregators here:

Wikipedia List of News Aggregators

INSTRUCTIONS: Personalize a Google Homepage with Syndicated RSS Feeds

STEP 1. Go to Google Home Page

NOTE: If you have a Google Account, go down to STEP 2.
If you don’t have a Google Account, click on the page where it says:

Not using Gmail or other Google Account services?
Create an account now

Fill out your email address, password and security code.

Google will send you an email message to confirm your address.
In the message, there is an URL for you to activate your account.

Once your Google account is activated,
you’ll see a list of Services Google offer.
Later on, you may want to join some of the other services.

The Google Home Page does not appear on that list of Services,
so go back to Google HomePage
and log into your Account.

STEP 2.

Look to left of the Google page where it says
“Personalize your Google homepage” and click there.

STEP 3.

Note how the left hand side of the page up after clicking on the
“Personalize your Google homepage” link,

STEP 4.

Google already has a number of RSS Feeds for Users to select.
To select each of them, click on the Headings (e.g. News)
and a number of different News Sources are displayed.

If you want those syndicated on your Google Page,
press the add >> button.

Note that CNET news is already under the heading Technology.

Once you’ve selected some RSS syndications,
your Google Home page will have headings of News Topics
displayed for you to click on and access immediately.

STEP 5. Add your Own Content to the Google Home Page

Click on Add Content again (from top left corner).

Select “Create a Section” (at bottom of list).

There are 2 things you could type into the Create a Section Search box:

1) Keyword(s) (on one of your favorite topics)
2) An RSS Feed URL from a website you’ve found.

1) Keyword(s)

In the empty Search box, type in any Keyword (or keywords),
to find RSS feeds from different sites on the Web.

Press the “Go” button and a summary of all the websites related to
the keyword(s) will appear.

For example, type “Golf” if you want to see all the Golf News of the day.

Press the add >> button if you want to Subscribe to any of those websites.

2) An RSS Feed URL from a website you’ve found.

I will illustrate what to do with an example.

Go to my blog here:
Julieanne’s Blog

Look at the top of Julieanne’s Blog.
See the little orange button labelled RSS?

=> Click on the orange button.

=> Copy (Ctrl C) the URL Address
(look towards top of your web browser for URL address).

=> Go back to Google Home page.

=> Click on Google Home page where it says
Add Content (upper left corner)

=> Select “Create a Section”.

=> Paste (Ctrl V) the URL of the RSS Feed into the Search box
under the Create a Section heading.

=> Press the Go Button.

The Add Content section on Google Home page will close.
The RSS syndication for Julieanne’s Blog
(or whatever Blog or website you’ve found) is displayed on the page.

Go on and find some other websites you like and repeat the above steps.

Now you can have your Home page filled up with heading summaries of all your favourite topics, and be updated whenever they change.

Those little orange buttons appear on lots of Web pages. Many of the buttons are labelled XML. Sometimes, there is just a link stating “RSS Feeds”, with no button. In that case just click on the link and copy the URL address as described above, in STEP 5.

Now, whenever you see a website with a RSS feed, you can have a summary of it, with links to each section on your Home page.

5) Why offer RSS feeds to Readers of your website?

Why do so many websites have these RSS feed URLs for Internet Readers?

* Most Blogs (online Journals) offer an RSS Feed, so their readers are notified whenever a new blog entry has been posted. RSS feeds are good for blogs, because the content of a blog is updated frequently.

* RSS Feeds are an ideal way for Bloggers (blog authors) to obtain fresh content for their own blogs.

* It’s very good publicity for Websites.

If an interesting heading pops up on an Internet Readers’ Aggregator, it’s simple and easy for them to get to the website to look at the detailed content.

So, the RSS feed drives traffic back to websites over and over.

* RSS Feeds permit instant distribution of content update to Consumers of products and services. If Consumers are subscribed to a site, they can find out immediately when there’s an update. Their might be an announcement of a new product, or an upgrade, or anything else that’s important for consumers to know.

* It’s a simple way to ensure that readers get information - much more reliable than sending out a newsletter via email, which may never reach the readers’ inbox.

Julieanne van Zyl is a Blogger on the Internet, and an Instructor in Computer Applications, for Beginners and Advanced Computer Users.

She has developed a Beginners Course to Blogging, which gives people detailed graphical instructions for setting up a blog and making money with it. Go here for this low cost course: Blog Basics

Article Source: New Articles Online