4 Easy Ways To Read Blogs Via RSS

RSS means “Really Simple Syndication”. It’s something many web sites offer to allow you to read articles without actually having to go there.

There are several ways to read RSS and it can be confusing to some. Don’t worry, I’ll make it really easy.

Method 1: Internet Explorer 8

(This should also work in IE 7 just fine as well.)

If you load up www.pcmech.com at look to the far right of the browser, you will see an orange “broadcast” image, like this:

Note: Your IE may look different from the above, but the icon will look the same.

If the web site you visit does not have an RSS feed, the icon will be grayed out.

If you do not have this icon, right click an empty area of the menu bar, choose Customize, then ADd or Remove Commands…, like this:

From the window that appears, place Feeds on the right, like this:

When this icon appears orange when you go to www.pcmech.com and you click it, this happens:

In the yellow bow at top you can choose to Subscribe to this feed.

When you click that, you see this:

I do suggest adding this to the Favorites Bar. You’ll see why in a moment.

Once subscribed to the feed, click the Favorites link then the Feeds tab. You should see something similar to this:

If you chose to “Add to Favorites” bar, you will get a drop-down button for the feed with the title of the feed in it. On click, this is what it looks like:

If you do not see this, you need to enable your Favorites bar. This is done by pressing ALT on your keyboard, then View, Toolbars, Favorites Bar, like this:

This may seem like a lot of work, but once you add in a few feeds it’s very easy to manage. You’ll also get notified via the bold text whenever a new article appears in the feed.

Method 2: Mozilla Firefox

Firefox has the same orange icon that IE 8 does. When you visit a web site that has a feed, the icon appears in the address bar and looks like this:

Like IE 8, it is clickable. When you click it however, you have more options compare to IE. It looks like this:

You can choose to subscribe to RSS feeds several different ways with Firefox.

The default method is Live Bookmarks, which acts almost identical to the way IE 8 does it.

The other default choices are web-based feed managers, like www.bloglines.com, http://my.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/reader.

However, you can also instruct Firefox to use a specific application to manage your feeds instead if you like. This is covered in the next section.

Method 3: Email application

Several email applications have the ability to read RSS feeds, but the ones I will concentrate on are Mozilla Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail.

In Thunderbird:

It’s required you add in an RSS & Blogs “account”. Don’t worry, the account is free, it’s just a title thing.

Click Tools, Account Options and then add a new account from there. Choose it as an “RSS & Blogs” account and you will be able to add in your feeds from that point.

To note: Thunderbird’s way of doing RSS isn’t exactly the most user-friendly thing in the world.

In Windows Live Mail:

RSS feeds are accomplished by clicking Feeds at the bottom left, OR, by pressing ALT on your keyboard, then Go, then Feeds, OR, by using the keystroke CTRL+SHIFT+K (to go back to Mail, it’s CTRL+SHIFT+J).

From there you just click “Add Feed” on the left.

Method 4: Standalone RSS Feed Application

Maybe you’d like to have your feeds in one application dedicated to that task. That’s not a problem because there are several and they’re free.

Here’s a few of them:

• FeedDemon
• FeedReader
• RSS Bandit

…and a whole bunch of others here. There are many. But the above three are absolutely dedicated to being an RSS reader first.

Other things you can subscribe to via RSS

You know you can subscribe to feeds from web sites, but there’s a few others that have feed ability too.

Twittter profiles

Want to catch up on what Dave (owner of PCMech) is tweeting about without using Twitter? Just go to http://twitter.com/davidrisley, the feed is right there and you’ll see the orange feed icon light up.

YouTube channels

All YouTube channels have RSS feeds as well. You can try out our YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/pcmedianet.

Forums

To note up front, not all forums have RSS feeds. Ours does. If you go to http://www.pcmech.com/forum, you’ll once again see the RSS icon light up.

Also remember that particular message bases inside the forum also have their own feeds. So if you want to subscribe to a very specific parts of the forums, just click thru to what you want to be updated on, then subscribe from there.

Anything else that has the RSS icon light up in your browser

If you go to any web site and see that orange icon appear, it has a feed you can subscribe to.