About Subscriptions

So, you’ve found a couple of blogs or websites that you like to read (hopefully mine is one of them!), and you want to keep up with the latest posts on those sites, but you don’t like wasting time going back to those websites multiple times a day to check and see if there is anything new posted. Wouldn’t it be great if somehow your favorite websites or blogs could tell you when they updated their site? There is!

RSS Feeds

RSS icon

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication, which is a way for websites to package and deliver their content across the internet without making people come to their website. The way they do this is by sending (syndicating) their content in an RSS feed, which anyone can subscribe to. When new content is posted to a website, the RSS feed gets updated and anyone who is subscribed to that feed gets the latest information from the feed. All blogs and most news-type websites have an RSS feed. Most will have an icon like the one to the right to let you know they publish an RSS feed.

How to Subscribe

There are two main ways to subscribe to RSS feeds:

1. Old School: Email. If you want, you can subscribe to my website by email. Just enter your email address in the field in the Get Site Updates section on the top-right of this page and you will get an email whenever I make a new post on my blog, no more than once per day. This method works well if you only subscribe to a couple of RSS feeds, but more than that and your inbox starts to gets clogged up. Luckily, there is an alternative…
2. New School: Feed Readers. Feed readers are a way for you to subscribe to multiple blogs or websites at one time and keep them all in one place. They aggregate multiple feeds on an account for you, so instead of going and visiting 10 different websites multiple times per day, you can add those ten websites to one feed reader. Then, you go to your feed reader and read the content from those 10 websites in one place. My favorite feed reader is Google Reader. It’s free, and anyone can sign up. All you have to do is click “Add a subscription,” enter the website address for the site you want to follow, and Google Reader will keep the site’s feed information up-to-date. Now, instead of visiting all of your different sites, you can just go to Google Reader to stay informed.