Steph Stuff

RSS continues to baffle some folks. I’ll admit to not grasping the concept either once upon a time. But once I did, I never looked back, and so it’s one of my missions to make my coworkers’, friends, relatives’, and anyone else’s lives as easy as possible when it comes to keeping a handle on all of the websites people visit on a daily basis.

So, I made a simple how-to on using Google Reader. Rather than go into what RSS is, anbd how many options there are out there for using it, I picked one, showed how to use it, and called it good. I found explaining everything about RSS put people off.

So, here’s my monkey sheet, and a quick & dirty (and in a noisy newsroom) screencast on using Google Reader and RSS:

The Wonders of RSS

You will need:
A Google account

Directions:

1. Log into your Google/Gmail account (same thing really)
2. Go to: http://reader.google.com/  – This will be your RSS Reader. It will pull new posts and updates from any website feed you add a subscription to. Think of it as like subscribing to a magazine. Keep this page open for now and open a new browser tab or window.
3. Now, you need to populate your reader with feeds. When you visit a website, you might notice an area on it that has a little orange square with some lines on it:    This means it has an RSS feed available to subscribe to.
4. In order to subscribe to a feed, you need it’s URL. Hover your mouse over that funky orange square and you can then right-click, then choose ‘Copy link location’ (on a PC. I dunno what happens on a Mac, but I imagine it’s a similar process.) OR you can just click the funky orange square which takes you to a weird looking version of the website, and then copy the link up in the browser address bar. It’s up to you. Either way, you need that URL.
5. Now, you’ve copied the link, let’s go back to your Google Reader page. Once there, on the left side column, at the top is a link or button called ‘Add a subscription’. Click it.
6. Paste in that URL you copied, and hit ‘Add’. That’s it.

Sometimes it may be hard to find that funky orange square. To know for sure if a website has an RSS feed, Firefox will put that box right up in the address bar. IE puts it next to the ‘Home’ button. Weird. If you don’t see it in either of those spots, then chances are the website does not offer RSS.

The beauty of using Google Reader as your RSS feed reader is that you can open it from any computer (if you are logged in, of course) and have your feeds ready to view.

Basically what the reader does is pull in updates from every subscription you add, then you can read them all in one place, at your leisure and then click to the website easily to comment or view the story there. It’s just such a timesaver and once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you got on without it.

Tags: Google reader, How-to, rss