RSS Feeds, are you using them?

You have probably seen them around on many websites, usually with a link on the bottom page or the side of a page. When you click the link you see a bunch of tags around the content you were just viewing. Most people probably think that what they are seeing is not for them and leave the page writing off RSS as something for geeks. Well you are wrong if you think that, RSS feeds are for everyone. What are they if they ARE for me you might ask? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it basically allows you to syndicate content from a site somewhere else. On first glance you might think this would only be applicable to people who have websites, however in reality it is actually most useful for everyday Internet users. Through the use of RSS you have the ability to view the news/information/updates from your favorite website at a centralized location. It means that you do not have to visit 6 news sites and hunt through your bookmarks every time you want an update on what is happening in relation to the things that matter. For example I use RSS feeds in conjunction with My Yahoo. I main yahoo page features articles from the CBC, Vive Le Canada, The Sky I Scrape, the BBC and many others. The beauty of it is you can read the content you want to read.

So how do you use RSS feeds? Well there are many ways, I said above I use My Yahoo, so that is one option, however there are also many RSS readers which act like an email reader except that they download your RSS information rather than emails. To show you how simple it is to use RSS I am going to walk you through adding the content from this website to My Yahoo.

First of all you need to have a My Yahoo account, which if you have an yahoo email account means you should have a My Yahoo account. Once you have gotten a My Yahoo account go to the website you want to syndicate content from and find the link to the RSS feed. Usually it is called RSS feed or Syndicate this site or something similar. Click the link to make sure the feed is working (you will know this by seeing a bunch of tags (otherwise known as XML) around the site content), then copy the URL from feed.

Next you will go to the My Yahoo account and sign yourself in. Once you are signed in you should see along the top of the page an Add Content link, click it. On the Add Content page beside the search box you should now see an Add RSS by URL, click that link. On the next page paste the URL of the RSS feed (for this site it is: http://blog.kloppmagic.ca/feed/rss2/) into the text box and click add. You will then be taken to a page that confirms the feed you wish to add, to complete the add of the feed simply click Add one more time and that is it. You now can view the latest content from my website in your My Yahoo account.

Through the use of RSS you now have the ability to view the content you want to view rather than what a news site thinks you should view. Here are a few RSS feeds I think are worth subscribing to:

Full list of CBC RSS feeds: http://www.cbc.ca/rss/
Partial list of BBC RSS feeds (at the bottom): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm
This Timeless Moment: http://blog.kloppmagic.ca/feed/rss2/
Vive Le Canada: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/backend/vivelecanada.rdf

If you come across some good feeds be sure to post them here!