RSS Feeds – A simple way to keep track of this blog whenever we post anything new

You’ve probably seen this orange box on the left a few times before. It’s there to tell you that you can subscribe to this site (or any other site that has this symbol) so that you can be notified whenever that site updates.

Its a very powerful tool especially if you visit various sites (newspapers, facebook friends, blogs etc) to find out what’s new. By subscribing to their RSS feed (the orange box) you don’t need to visit each and every site. Whenever those sites update their information your “feed” will be updated with whatever new information has been posted.

For example the feed for this blog is http://scholsbiz.edublogs.org/feed/. To find out when this blog updates go through these simple steps;

1. Go to this website http://www.google.com/reader
   
2. Either setup a google account or login to google with an account you already have
3. Click the box in the left hand side of the page that says “Add subscription”
4. Paste into that box the feed address for this blog http://scholsbiz.edublogs.org/feed/
5. That’s it … easy as. Now everytime you go to http://www.google.com/reader you will see any new information we have updated without having to visit this site each time.

• You can add lots of other feeds … for example you can add blogs from your friends myspace pages by adding something like this http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=0000000 (change the numbers obviously)
• In bebo you can click on the link that says “subscribe to feeds”
• You can add a feed from the Sydney Morning Herald http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/top.xml
• You can add feeds from most websites nowadays. Once you’ve added a lot of feeds you can then use Google Reader as a way of keep track of all of these sites and not have to go to each site individually to find out what’s new.

You don’t only have to use Google Reader. There are other alternatives. Personally I use bloglines but Google Reader is easy to use and straight forward.

If you prefer to see a vid that explains all of this then, rather than trawling through all the blurb above, have a look at this youtube vid from commoncraft