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.

Technorati Tags: RSS Appreciation Day

Comments

[techbee]

Dear Mr Rubel, I don't think the 1st of May is the best of day for RSS evangelism over here in continental Europe. It's Labour Day from Moscow to Paris. Everyone is off work or demonstrating for workers rights. Nice idea, with a touch of ethnocentrism...

[Richard Harlos]

This is a great topic to post about. Though I'm very comfortable with RSS, I know a lot of people who are not.

I do have one reservation, though: the use of Google as the starting point for RSS tracking.

I'm not speaking from the user's point of view, rather from my own. I find that FeedBurner feeds cannot distinguish between one Google reader subscription and a hundred, presumably due to the way Google tracks and reports their subscription info.

So in review, your post is great for getting non-RSS savvy folks into RSS but not much help to those of us who are trying to monitor our feed traffic and respones.

In any event, cheers! :)

[Bruce Barber]

I am a Mac user, so let me chime in with a vote for setting up RSS folders in your toolbar (if you're running Tiger with Safari 2.0 or higher).

For Windows users-- download the IE7 beta and add RSS feeds to your favorites!

[Easton Ellsworth]

Great idea, Steve. Today is also a special day for me because it's my first monthly Blogtipping Day.

It's helpful to remember what the RS in RSS stands for - Really Simple! I wonder how much we believe the "really" part.

Once you switch over to using RSS instead of browsing as your main Web activity for discovery, you just don't ever want to go back!

[David@mokum]

Funny thing is I have done this exact thing with some of my clients. I wanted them to read a "clippings" file of articles I collect with Newsgator and publish as an RSS feed (great stuff from Newsgator).
What I found is that most of my clients have a news paper site as their homepage rather than Google, and therefore have to navigate there to read the posts. I guess most people will still get to Google on a regular basis so it will work, but it was an interesting thing to learn about my customers. Are there any statistics on what (business) people tend to have as their homepage?