Writers Wrap Up - On RSS Feeds

Wondering why the topic of RSS feeds might be important to you as an author or aspiring writer? Actually, it's a really good thing to have for anyone who has a busy life, so readers - this is for you too!

Tracking blogs, websites and message boards by linking through RSS feeds allows you to visit all the sites you want to watch and/or participate in, by setting up a Reader Area and adding the feed URLs for the places you want to watch. Once it's set up, one click takes you in, you can see at a glance which of your watched urls have new messages, read them centrally, go to them to add a post if you wish. It is heaps faster than visiting individual sites.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about RSS feeds.

Blogline, MyYahoo, Google Reader and more all allow you to set up a centralised reading in which you can collate, manage and read from all your RSS feeds. As I already had a gmail account set up, I used Google Reader for mine. Took mere minutes to organise. Just put the site URLs in and away you go.

For those who have a blogger page that goes up under a website page name, as mine does, the feed doesn't seem to work. I have my website person looking into this and hope to have a resolution soon.

You also have the option of adding an RSS feed button to your blog or website, which people can click to add you to the list rather than cutting and pasting your url. Try AddThis.com for the html code for this.

I'm looking at a busy week, and my reading time has pretty much ground to a halt just at present, but I will hope to be back with one more book review before the end of this week.

Jennie