RSS is short for something I don’t feel like looking up, so I’m going to go with Rocking Salad Shuttle.
Push your mouse wheel down over this link and come right back: http://mkronline.com/feed/
Welcome back!
One of two things happened:
1. A bunch of text showed up, probably with a line at the top that babbled on about XML.
2. Your were offered a way to subscribe
#1 is kind of a problem, and you shouldn’t have encountered it. Most browsers pick up RSS feeds and make them useful to humans. #2 is great. You can add it to your favorite feed reader–and you’ll want one after you finish this article–and get updates from all your favorite personalities.
Let’s try this on a different site. Push your mouse wheel down on this link and come right back: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/movies/feed
At this point, you might be catching on. If you follow the movies feed of your favorite site for keeping up on movies, you don’t miss a thing, and you don’t have to check the site all the time. Posts on a blog linked on something like Twitter or Facebook get lost in the stream, but this is delivered straight to you.
You might recall this from several paragraphs up:
Pretty much every site has an RSS feed. For now–we’ll get to that later.
This is later. RSS, this great way to keep up, is slowly slipping away as fewer people use it. You probably didn’t even know it was an option. And as fewer people use it, web designers are less likely to keep it in updates.
So how can you keep it alive? Use it! Google’s own RSS reader is going away as the company refocuses on other products, but there are plenty of good alternatives. I personally use Feedly, but Newsblur gets a lot of praise.
This is a good site that popped up after Google announced the impending shutdown of Google Reader: http://www.replacereader.com/
It’s a list of Google Reader alternatives ranked by votes. You can usually find the RSS feeds for a site by looking for an orange icon, or by pressing Control and F at the same time to bring up a search box, which you can use to search for RSS. A lot of sites put it at the bottom of the page.
I’ve dabbled with Google Reader, but never found myself using it as my primary reading venue. It does seem to me that RSS is a much more efficient way of reading things, though, and I’m interested in trying again.
I installed feedly, but there is a problem with its Firefox integration. Now, whenever I view an image, there is an unsightly feedly button in the middle. I’ve been looking for a way to change this, but haven’t found one yet. Still – I will persevere.
Go over to the list of categories and scroll down until you see Preferences. The option you’re looking for is “Mini Toolbar.” Which seems weird at first, that it would be called a toolbar, until you click it and there’s a toolbar.
Turn it off.
The little gear a the top of a feed will open a box where you can click “Titles” and make it more familiar.