RSS Feeds

Personally, I have been using RSS feeds for quite some time.

I prefer to view a site through Google Reader (or another rss reader) because it allows me to save the time in looking to see if there is another post (or new content on the site). Most of the time, I simply go to Google Reader instead of actually going to other websites because I have a large number of sites that it keeps track of for me. One of the sites that I keep track of with it is a 'digg style' site (30-50 posts per day), where users submit content to it. This would be very time consuming to have to go to that page multiple times every day to see if there was something that was interesting to me. With Google Reader, all I have to do is click on the feed and see if there is anything interesting in the titles of the posts, and if there is, I end up going to look at it, otherwise I just ignore it.

There are three ways to add an RSS feed to Google Reader. The first way is to go to the page and look to see if there is an rss icon in the address bar. If there is, you just click on it and a page will load asking you what you want to do with the rss feed. Here you can make it a live bookmark in your browser (at least in Firefox) or you can add it to your Google homepage, or you can add it to Google Reader, or you can just copy the link into another RSS reader.

The second way of adding something your reader is to search for it from within Google Reader. All you have to do is click on the "Add Subscription" and it asks you for the URL of the feed, or you can use it to search for something to add.

A third way is to use the browse recommendations functionality in Google Reader. This only really works if you have at least one or two feeds that you are already subscribed to. It lists various feeds that Google recommends to you based on the feeds that you are already keeping track of.