The best way to read a blog, or any other site with regular updates, is to subscribe to its RSS feeds. The RSS feed is just a special kind of web page that is easy for the various feed readers to parse and extract the latest updates. Most modern email programs will also double as an RSS reader. Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and I also think Outlook (or at least Outlook Express) does a good job at this. There is also a large selection of dedicated RSS readers, both free, sharware and commercial. You just have to find the one you prefer. You can also use the Google services to subscribe to feeds, and the benefit of this is that you can access your feeds from any computer.
Oh, just in case your wondered, it is all free, and you will not have to give out any information about yourself. It is just an automated way of checking a web site on regular intervals.
My feeds
On this page I have two main feeds. One for the blog, which includes all the posts, and is meant for reading the written material and to look at the pictures. This feed will also include the audio posts, and you will see links to the audio files. Then I have a dedicated podcast feed that only includes the posts containing audio or video. This is the feed you would want to add to iTunes.
You also find these links in the right column under the “Subscribe” heading.
Blog feed
– http://blog.lentic.net/feed/
Podcast feed
– http://blog.lentic.net/feed/podcast/
Subscribe in Google
How does it work
Once you have installed your RSS reader, you can start to add feeds to it. The process of adding a feed varies a bit from system to system. In some web browser / feed reader combination, you only have to double click on a feed icon for the page you want to subscribe to, and everything works automatically, for other combinations you have to copy the address hiding behind that feed icon and paste it into the rss reader.You should look for menu items or buttons with the words “Subscribe to feed”, “Add feed”, “Subscribe to RSS”, or somthing similar in your RSS reader.
Once you have your feeds ready, the rss reader will start to automatically check your feeds on a regular interval. Every time something new is published, it will notify you, and you can click on the articles that are interesting and read them. The good part is that you no longer have to browse through a number of web sites to see if something new is added.
Different kind feeds
There are a couple of different standard formats for feeds these days, and it can be a bit confusing. You got RSS, RSS2 and Atom in a couple of versions. All modern readers will accept any feed your throw at it, and as a user you will probably never know the difference. I usually prefer RSS2, and then Atom if RSS2 is not available.
What about Podcasts
A podcast feed works in much the same way as an ordinary RSS feed, except that it also contains some sort of media file (audio or video). This kind of feed should be added to a podcast fetcher instead, like iTunes. Every time a new podcast episode is published, your podcast fetcher will notify you, and you can play it on your computer or your portable player.
