Two weeks ago I gave you a few tips for writing your own blog, and hopefully it provided a few of you with the incentive to get out and start a new one, or breath some life into your existing one. Blogging is not just about writing though. A large part of it is reading other people's blogs, and adding your own comments or trackbacks (posts in your blog that are replies to, or reference, posts in another blog).
With so many blogs out there it would be tedious to visit each one in turn, checking to see if they had any new posts. In 1999 Ramanathan V. Guha from Netscape created RSS as a way of pulling other website content onto the Netscape homepage, and Bloggers quickly saw the potential for sharing their blogs with a wider auduence. All the major blog platforms added RSS feeds to their site, and later the similar Atom format was adopted as well (it was technically better than RSS, which had some compatibility problems between versions). Software for the desktop was created which allowed people to subscribe to these feeds, and be notified when there was new content.
Over the past couple of years RSS and Atom have started appearing all over the web, easily identified by the bright orange 'radio wave' symbol. If you see this logo on a site or in your browser, it means there is a feed available for you to subscribe to. Popular feed readers are Liferea for Linux and FeedReader for Windows, but many other programs and websites are able to use the feeds and display them. Microsoft Outlook can display them as a folder of messages similar to your email, and My Yahoo and Google Reader allow you to view them on a website.
Subscribing to a feed generally means clicking on the orange icon on the page, or clicking the feed icon in your browsers address bar, to load the feed in the browser window. This will give you a preview of the feed and normally will give you a couple of options such as adding it to Live Bookmarks. When this page has loaded, copy the URL from the address bar. Next, switch to your feed reader and press the New Feed button. Different feed readers use different buttons, menus and terminology, so look in the Help menu for that program if you are not sure. Paste the URL you copied into the New Feed dialog, and the program will download the feed and make it available, highlighting all the unread messages.
As you read, the program will mark the messages as 'read,' similar to an email message, and you will be notified when there are new messages available.
Hopefully that will be enough to get you started with RSS and Atom feeds, and get you started on reading many more blogs and websites. As you read them jot down any ideas you get for your own blog. Reading other people's blogs is a great source of inspiration. Just make sure you link back to theirs if you mention them.
Feed icon from www.feedicons.com.
