What does ‘Subscribe for Free’ mean?
You can subscribe to this site using what is called an RSS (‘really simple syndication”) feed. But, there may be a few of you out there who don’t know what this means. No problem. Here’s what you need to know to subscribe to content on this site, and other sites which are of interest to you.
Why subscribe to RSS?
Basically, subscribing to RSS feeds is a way for you to create a single location on the Internet where articles from your favorite sites are available to you all in one place.
All the materials you see on the home pages of these big sites like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL use RSS technology, giving you a way to access content from many other websites by presenting it you in a series of images and links on your homepage. This is a convenient way for you to customize your page so that you can browse interesting content that originates from many different places on the Internet without having to search for it.
But, before you can start customizing a page for yourself, you have to get an RSS reader.
How Do I Get an RSS Reader?
There are a couple of ways to do this:
1) Download an RSS reader which is designed to be an application on your computer. This manages RSS materials from various sites kind of like how Outlook manages email. Examples of downloadable feed readers are feeddemon, Newsgator, sharpreader (windows), and netNewsWire (for Mac OS X).
2) Use an online RSS reader like:
This way you can pick and choose which content you want to access without having to navigate to the page where the content is posted. It’s right in front of you; sometimes, you can even read the content without even having to leave your home page!
Simply sign up for a free account, make the page your homepage, and start subscribing to feeds which interest you. Then, read the latest news as it comes through the feed. Simple.
But, what is a “feed” and how do I subscribe to one?
How Do I subscribe to a feed?
On sites which allow you to subscribe to their content through a reader, you’ll see a button which looks like this:
If you want to subscribe to new materials which are featured on the site you’re interested in, the next step is pretty easy - click that button.
Once you do, you’ll get the option to include the feed on the homepage of your choice - like iGoogle, or MyYahoo, etc, usually by a pulldown menu like this:
There are other readers which will ask you to copy and paste the web address of a RSS feed into a text feed in order to display the content of that feed on your page. This tells your reader where to pull the content from.
This is an example of a feed web address: http://newsroom.builddirect.com/feed
This actually happens to be the feed for this news room. You can either cut and paste this into your RSS reader, or just choose your reader of choice and ’subscribe now’. When you do this, the reader will know where the content is coming from and it will be displayed on your page the next time you go to that page. And, it will update automatically every time new content is added onto the original website.
Like bookmarking, subscribing to RSS feeds is a great way to gather all of your interests from some of your favorite web pages all in one place. And it’s a great way to stay current without having to spend a long time tracking down websites and content. RSS gives you the option of having that content come to you!
For more information about RSS, read the BuildDirect RSS page which explains some of this in greater detail.
