How to use RSS Feeds

This topic might not look interesting at first glance but I promise it will be worth reading it. More than 900 readers subscribed to the feeds of ghacks.net using feedburner alone while many more are using different services to read my feeds. But what are feeds ? They are a short abstract of every article that gets posted here. This means whenever I write an article it will automatically appear in those peoples feed reader software. Many browsers for instance are able to read feeds or can be upgraded to read them.

For Firefox you´ve got the Wizz RSS News Reader extension for instance or the Info Rss extension. Opera has this ability build in and Internet Explorer, well I don´t know about this one because I´am not using this software. (Only checking my sites design with it). So, you´ve got the internal feedreaders and you also got feedreaders that are external programs.

One of the greatest of them is called, guess what, Feedreader. The freeware works under Win98+, is completely open source, small in size and easy to use. Feedreader comes with a preinstalled list of feeds which you may select to keep or to remove after the installation. I suggest you keep them for now and delete them later when you find out that they are not useful at all.

You see some folders on the left like Tech or Entertainment. Clicking a folder opens the sites that you are currently subscribed to. Feedreader checks for new items now and will display some for every site.Whenever you click on a feed feedreader displays the latest articles, clicking on an article displays the article on the window to the right. Sometimes you can read the complete article, sometimes it´s only a preview of the article. A click on the articles title opens the web page containing that article.

Feedreader loads the articles by default in the same window that you clicked the article, to change that go to Tools -> Options and select Open link in default browser which opens all new links in your default browser.

Why are so many people reading rss feeds ? I think it´s mostly a matter of time. You can add as many sites as you want and all articles are displayed in one program. You don´t need to navigate to several websites, you find all news in that single program which is a great time saver if you ask me.