Feed Reader Demystified

After a recent comment by an avid reader of this blog, I'm covering Feed Readers today. I will try to explain what a feed reader does and how you can benefit from this great service by popular email providers.

If you like this blog and read it regularly, you can do it two ways. The first way is to visit this blog at a set time everyday (even multiple times) to check if a new post has been published. It's fairly easy to do, all you need is to remember/bookmark the site address and visit at a convenient time. This is okay as long as you are reading only a couple of blogs a day. If you would like to read (let's say) 50 blogs, you'll agree that visiting each blog everyday will soon become a chore. That's why there's a second way - subscribe!

If you use Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail, you can easily subscribe to many blogs using their readers. The most popular, of course, is the Google Reader and you can log-in with your existing Google/Gmail id. If you don't have a Google id, I recommend you get one ASAP. No, Google doesn't pay me to advertise for them (I hope they're reading this).

In the left panel you'll see this 'Add Subscription' button. You can use this to type in the URL of the blog you want to track. That's it! The reader will automatically get updated every time a new post is published on the blog. All you need to do is log-in to the reader to access all the blogs you love to read. No wonder it's called 'Really Simple Syndication' or RSS. To read the definition on Wikipedia, click here. Click below to watch a video of RSS explained in plain english:

Leave a comment if you'd like me to explain other web services.