RSS: What it can do for you

Last week we briefly explained Really Simple Syndication. And a little about how it works. This week week we will take look at what the average user can do with RSS.

You may have noticed a little icon on our site. You may also have noticed the little orange icon at the bottom or top of your web browser on certain sites. If you see either or both of these icons on a site or in your browser while visiting a site, you will know that these sites contain material that can be syndicated.

RSS and Mozilla Firefox:

If you are a Firefox user, you have some great RSS tools already available. One of our favorites is called Live Bookmarks. In Firefox click on the orange icon in your address bar. A window will come up, click OK in the window that comes up. Now, you should have a new bookmark that will expand and show you the most recent material added to the site.

Go ahead, you should see it in the address bar above while visiting www.HelpMeRick.com.

Firefox also has a great little RSS reader extention that allows you to add feeds from sites in a sidebar.

RSS and email: 

If the idea of receiving news and other updates in your email is appealing, there are a few ways this can work. There are some programs on the web that claim to give you the ability to subscribe to RSS feed and receive them by email, but these programs are geeky at best.

Tracking RSS feeds is becoming a key use for computers. While Microsoft Internet Explorer won't officially support tracking RSS until it releases Internet Explorer 7 next year, Mozilla and Opera are ahead of the game. Both Mozilla Thunderbird and Opera's email reading programs offer the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds via email.

This web site lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and get them delivered to you via email.

Customizing your news:

As we touched on last week, if you setup a custom home page like my.yahoo.com or  Google's personalized homepage, you can add RSS updates to the first page you see everytime you log onto your computer.

Many local and national papers, TV stations, and blogs all offer RSS feeds that can be added to your personal homepage.

Even eBay now offers the ability to add RSS updates so you can load a feed of a certain search topic or eBay user.

Here are a few other great RSS tools to help you get into the RSS craze! 

RssReader

Pluck

FeedDemon

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