What are RSS Feeds?

Introduction

When you are reading a book, you use a bookmark to mark a page where you stopped or a page which is important to you. This also happens on the web. You probably have an list of  the URLs of websites you like. Some of you are probably familiar with the bookmark feature of your browsers: the star in Google Chrome’s address bar, the Favorite>Add to Favorites in Internet Explorer, and CLTR+D in Firefox.

Browser bookmarking is good way to mark your favorite sites, but the problem is that browsers are not capable of informing you when site you bookmarked new articles or updates.  You have to visit the website to check for new articles.

This is where RSS comes in.  It’s like a browser saying ‘Hey, Math and Multimedia has a new post.’ This is similar to email subscriptions: users are informed whenever a site is updated.  Some RSS feed management providers such as Feedburner offer RSS email subscriptions as well. » Read more

Using Google Reader to Subscribe to a Blog

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to  use Google Reader to subscribe to a blog or website. Before you can do this, first you must have a Google account and second, the website that you are subscribing to must have RSS feeds.  Blogs, pages, or websites with RSS feeds usually have RSS icons (see number 2 below).

Suppose, you like the Mathematics and Multimedia blog and you want to subscribe to its RSS feeds. You should do the following steps:

1. Log-in to your Google Account and go to the Reader page.

Figure 1

2. Go to the blog that you want to subscribe to (you’re already here) look for the RSS Feed button and click it.

» Read more

1 2