How to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Unfortunately if you’re not familiar with blogging terminology, it doesn’t seem so simple. An RSS feed is entirely useless if you don’t know how to use it.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need a feed reader. My reader of choice is Bloglines. It’s web-based, a plus for those of us who work on more than one computer.

Other options include the Google Reader, My Yahoo, or the browser-based Mozilla Thunderbird. I’ve tried them all and for what it’s worth, settled on Bloglines for its ease of use and functionality.

After you’ve registered for an account, click on Tools in your browser’s toolbar, then options. This will bring up the following pop-up box. (Note that yours will look different than the illustration if you use a browser other than Firefox.)

Simply click on the feeds tab, and select “Subscribe to the feed using,” then click on Bloglines, then OK.

Next, navigate back to this blog, and click on the little orange icon to the right of the address bar:

Your Bloglines will open up (you may need to log-in first), and you’ll be presented with the following screen:

File it in the top folder or create a new folder. Add a note if you like. Then click subscribe. You’ll then find this feed under the “Feeds” tab at the left of your screen.

That little orange subscribe icon will show up in your browser’s address bar whenever an RSS feed is available for a page. And now that you’re set up in Bloglines, two or three clicks of the mouse are all that it takes to subscribe and receive automatic updates on any topic you find interesting.

Related Articles:

Do You Subscribe to Blog Feeds? This post thoroughly covers why you’d want to read your blogs with a feed reader and provides links to several different feed readers.

Newbie’s Guide to Google Reader  What is Google Reader and why should you use it?