Three Steps to Reading RSS Feeds

Today, May 1, is RSS Appreciation Day. Let's see how many of our non-feed-reading friends we can teach.

To kick it off, here's an easy three-step tutorial on how to get started reading feeds using Google. I am going to send this to five of my relatives, colleagues and friends. Feel free to spread this tutorial around. Maybe just maybe, if we all evangelize we can get hundreds more of us reading feeds.

1) Visit the Google Personalized Home Page. If you have a Gmail account, sign in so your feeds follow you on any device. However, if you're squeamish about registering, you don't need to. When you arrive on the page, here's what it looks like if you have not configured it.

2) Click the Add Content link at the top of the page. Search for sites you visit frequently or for topics you care deeply about. For example, it could be the New York Mets, CNN, news about Israel, your local newspaper - e.g. The Washington Post - or even Xbox news.

3) Once you find a feed that interests you click the button that says "Add it now." Once you have finished adding feeds, click the link in the top left hand side of the page that says "Back to homepage."

That's all there is to it! Once your back on your home page you can move the different feeds around by dragging the blue title bars. You can also remove the feeds that you don't care about by clicking the "x" button to close it. Now anytime there is new information published about the Mets or Israel or any news from CNN.com it will land on your personalized page. You don't have to keep checking these sites for updates. That's the beauty of RSS.

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