What is…RSS and why do we feed it?
Wow, you’re seeing “RSS” or “get my feed” on a lot of websites lately. Or maybe you’ve just noticed images like this 
all over? What does it mean? How can I use it? Don’t worry. Witchy Tech is here to help!
Short Answer: A website’s RSS feed is a document which directs the site’s new content to you. You don’t have to visit the site every day to check for new content! You use it by subscribing to the feed in a “feed reader” or your browser, if it has a built-in reader. The advantage of this is that the website comes to you when it has new content, and you decide if you want to read that content before visiting the site.
Long Answer: “RSS” stands for “really simple syndication” and it truly is simple. Well, once you understand the basics. The “syndication” means just what you think it does. Your favorite TV shows or comics are “syndicated” to appear on your local TV station or in your local paper, even though they were produced to appear on one particular network or for one newspaper. On the internet, content written for your favorite sites can be syndicated in a similar fashion. If you think of an RSS feed as a “broadcast” of a websites articles or content, you have a good grasp of the concept.
How do I know if my favorite sites have a feed?
Websites like to say right out if they are broadcasting a feed. You can look for the RSS symbol of a dot and parentheses (), or “subscribe to my feed” or just the letters RSS somewhere on the website. All of these will be linked directly to the feed. Look around the Witchy Tech home page. We broadcast two feeds: one for the articles or entries like the one you’re reading now, and one for just the comments people make on the articles. Do you see the links? Click on them to see the Witchy Tech feeds.
(Note: Witchy Tech broadcasts its feeds already formatted. If you click on one of your favorite websites’ feed link and you get a page with a bunch of gobbledygook, that’s okay! It just means they are sending their feed unformatted. It will look okay in your FEED READER, which we will discuss below.)
How do I use RSS?
In order to use RSS feeds, you need something called a “feed reader” or “feed aggregator” for your computer. This is a little program which displays the headlines/articles from your syndicated sites and you just click on the articles you want to read. This can be a real timesaver! For example, Witchy Tech isn’t updated everyday. So why come to the site every day? If you have a feed reader, you are alerted to when a new article is posted on Witchy Tech, and you just click on the feed if you want to read the whole article or “mark as read” if you don’t to remove it from your feed list, Feed readers are free to download and easy to use. All they need is the webpage address with the feed on it (the page to which the RSS symbol or “subscribe” links).
If you travel or don’t always use the same computer, the search website “Google” offers a feed reader online, which collects your favorite feeds onto a website. All you have to do is log in to it from anywhere and all your feeds are there for you to browse.
However, the most convenient way for us non-technical types to use feeds is to have them appear in your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, or in your email program.
Internet Explorer:
In Internet Explorer (Version 7 or later), look for the “Feeds” button on your toolbar. It will be the orange symbol.
Witchy’s Note: If it is not there, and you have Internet Explorer 7, just right click on a blank space on the toolbar. The toolbar is the row of the browser that has the “star” for the favorites list, the tabs of the webpages you have open, and the “Home”, “Print”, etc. buttons. From the menu that pops up, rest your cursor on “Customize Command Bar” and from the submenu, click on “Add or Remove Commands.” From the column on the left, select “FEEDS” option, then click the “Add” button. You will see that the “FEEDS” option is now in the right column. Click the “Close” button.
If you are on a site which does not broadcast a feed, the FEEDS button will be grayed out. If the site you are on broadcasts a feed, the FEEDS button will be orange. Click the button to see the feed the website is broadcasing. It will usually be the titles of the articles or a summary, or the first paragraph.
If you would like to subscribe to the feed, click the “subscribe to this feed” link, represented by a star symbol with a plus symbol on it. As you can see, you can sort your feeds into different folders, but for now, just add it to “Feeds” and if you subscribe to a lot of them, you can make folders.
To check your feeds, click on the Star button on the left side of your browser toolbar (or hold down the “Alt” key and press the letter “c”). This takes you to your Favorites Center. At the top of the favorites center, click the FEEDS button. Feeds you haven’t read are in bold, so you only have to read feeds that have new content (”unbold” a feed by clicking on it and viewing the feed).
Firefox
Firefox will tell you in the address location bar if a site broadcasts an RSS feed. It will show the symbol at the right margin of the location box.
Click on the symbol to see the feed. You can subscribed to the feed using a number of feed readers, but the simplest is “Live Bookmarks”… Select “Live Bookmarks” and click the “Subscribe Now” button. This stores the feed as a bookmark (or “Favorite” if you are more used to the IE term) and you can sort it just as you would a bookmark. To see the articles. just rest your cursor on the feed’s bookmark and the titles of all the articles will pop up as a submenu.
Witchy Tip: I keep my Firefox feeds in a folder on my “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder” for easy access. You can leave them like that if you wish, but I have installed an extension to show my feeds as a ticker at the bottom of my browser. If you would like to try this here is the info on the RSS ticker, but please note, it only lists the titles of the articles being broadcast. Some people might want a little more info. There are lots of RSS feed reader and feed applications you can plug into Firefox.
Conclusion
Once you are comfortable with checking and reading your feeds, you will naturally start to sort them and customize them for your personal browsing style.
By the way, if you subscribe to Witchy Tech by email, you are already getting our RSS feed in your email inbox! If you find that you like collecting feeds in a reader or in your browser, you can unsubscribe to the email update and just subscribe to our feed in your reader.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
I’m trying to email you but it won’t go through. I even knew to change the AT to @ but that didn’t work either. Can you email me? I have a cool article on robots I wanted to send you.
I am glad you got it, Patti T!
@Juanita Violini: I will gladly email you! (And I’ll find out what’s wrong with my email thing! ARRGH!) Should you or anyone ever want to contact me, feel free to use the forum! I check it every day!
@Juanita, Your email bounced back to me, too! Our mail providers must be having a feud! I will try again this evening.
I always wondered what that was. Thanks for explaining.