RSS Feed

Ok, this is very technical. I feel so cool knowing all this. Yesterday, I found this great article on RSS Feed. What is rss feed? It is this cool thing where you kind of subscribe to my blog kind of. You have an RSS program that will check my blog and tell you when I've posted. So you don't have to keep checking my blog to see if I've posted or any of the other people's blogs you read. When the person posts a new post then it will show up on you feedreader program and you can read it right from there. That was a terrible way of explaining it. If you still don't understand, here's what Lindsey said (she's way more eloquent than I am):

What the heck is an RSS feed? This was the question I heard the most last week, LOL! It took me a while to catch on too, but now that I’ve got this little gem figured out, I’m ADDICTED. You know how lots of websites and blogs have a way for you to subscribe to updates via email? An RSS feed is sort of like this. Here’s the Wikipedia explaination. This is how I understand RSS (and keep in mind - this is MY understanding, not the true technical definition). Every time that I publish a post, the post is sent to my RSS feed for my site. The address for my RSS feed is: http://www.mysuspensionofdisbelief.com/?feed=rss2 If you click on this link, you’ll see all the post info from my site, but it isn’t very visually pleasing. That’s just fine. People don’t read RSS feeds in this format. Instead, they read them in a feed reader.

There are many different types of feed readers. Different web browsers have them integrated - there are extensions for Firefox and for the new Internet Explorer 7. There are web based feed readers such as NewsGator and Feedster. And there are programs you can download to your computer, such as FeedReader (the one I use) and Pluck.

A feed reader works like an email program. For example, let’s say that I want to know when Suspension of Disbelief updates. I could either check the site every day to see if there is an update, or I could subscribe to the feed, and every time that a new post is made, my feed reader gets the new feed . . . like you’d get an email update. I can read the post in my feed reader, or I can click the link to read it on the web. The key is that I don’t have to go check the site every day. This can be VERY helpful if you have lots of blogs that you like to read. I have different folders in my feed reader for blogs of my friends, business blogs, tech blogs, etc. I can read so much more because I don’t have to keep checking the sites!

I downloaded the program feedreader to put all the blogs that I read into. You subscribe to their RSS Feed and then it keeps track for you. It saves tons of time. So I added an RSS Feed link on the bottom right of my blog (that's how you'll subscribe).