Subscribing to a Blog
I never thought too much about blogs. I see them all the time, because whenever you search the web for something, many of the results are blog articles. But I never subscribed to one or became a fan or follower of any of them. But now that I’ve started blogging I began to take notice of friends and colleagues who are blogging. I started to think about how I can subscribe to their blogs (so I don’t have to go to each site one by one) and how the whole subscription process works.
I know about RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) and the little orange logo that you see on most blogs. If you click the symbol you get a no-frills view of the blog (called the feed). Sometimes blogs will have a set of icons that will add the blog to various blog readers and subscription services. Some of the more popular are:
- Blogger
- MyYahoo
- MyMSN
- Bloglines
- Netvibes
- Newsgator
The benefit of using a feed subscription service like Google or MyYahoo is that your favorite feeds will remain available when you change computers. They also let you sort and filter all of your blogs various ways. With Google you can add the feed to your iGoogle homepage, or to the Google reader. Google also has something called Blogger, which tracks all the blogs you read and write.
Another way to subscribe to blog feeds is within your browser. Internet Explorer has a tab for feeds in the favorites bar. It’s easy to add a blog subscription – just go to the blog, click on the feed link, and then click “Subscribe to this Feed”. In Firefox it’s about the same process, except that there’s a dropdown list that lets you choose what you want to subscribe with (Outlook, Bloglines, Google, etc.). Firefox also has lots of plug-ins that manage RSS and news feeds.
My favorite way to subscribe to blogs is using MS Outlook. I typically keep Outlook open on my computer all day, so it’s really handy, and the blog feed looks just like another one of my email archive folders. Whenever a blog is updated with a new post the Outlook subfolder for that blog goes bold to let me know about it (just like a new email coming in). To add a blog subscription to Outlook, first go to the blog, click the RSS feed icon to get to the feed, and copy the URL for the feed into the clipboard. Then go to Outlook, right-click the “RSS Feeds” folder and click “Add a New RSS Feed” and paste in the feed URL. That’s it!