Part Two: Personal Start Pages
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More and more Web users are turning to RSS feeds to manage the onslaught of news and information on the Web. In this step-by-step guide, we'll show you how to use this powerful tool—how to become a consumer of RSS feeds.

RSS is the solution to having too many Web sites to check every day. With an RSS reader (a program that looks something like a Web browser), you automatically collect headlines and summaries from many different sites—including blogs, if you like—all in one place. The result is a customized briefing from every source that interests you. And you avoid the mess of spam and other superfluous stuff that chokes the typical e-mail in-box these days.

We say "you," because we believe it's critical that anyone involved in publishing any form of content on the Web be familiar with RSS feeds. For a more in-depth discussion, see Why Web Publishers Need RSS.

So, let's go for a test drive.

We'll help you set up and subscribe to RSS feeds (also known by the friendlier term "Web feeds") in two different settings. We'll start with a stand-alone, dedicated RSS reader. Then we'll show you how to get RSS feeds to display on a personal start page such as My Yahoo, a recent trend that is bringing RSS into the mainstream.
 

PART 1: DEDICATED FEED READERS

Step 1: Register with Bloglines
There are many dedicated programs for reading RSS or Web feeds. Some are programs that reside in your computer. But we like the programs that live on the Web because they allow you to tune into your feeds from any computer with an Internet connection.

We'll use Bloglines, a free and straightforward Web-based reader. Despite its name, it reads feeds from any Web source, not just blogs.

To get to the Bloglines site in a separate Web browser, you can click on this link—Bloglines. If that doesn't open a separate browser, start one up manually and go to this address: http://www.bloglines.com/. Once you're at the Bloglines site, click on the tiny "Register" link at the top right corner of the page and complete the brief registration form. Yes, you have to register. It's a nice free tool—we have to give them something.

Once you've filled out the form and clicked on "Register," you'll receive a confirmation e-mail message. Follow the instructions in that message, and you'll be taken to a Bloglines page that helps you get started subscribing to feeds from a list of "Quick Picks."
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Step 2: Set up a Few Feeds
We're going to subscribe to three feeds here by clicking on the "+" icons (to expand the topic listings) and putting a check mark in each the following:

• Investor: Smartmoney.com
• Music Lover: Rolling Stone Music News
• Tech Guru: NYT > Technology

Now that your check marks are in place, click on "Subscribe to My Selections."

Bloglines then shows you a new page (your Bloglines page), with 4 feeds listed in the left-hand column under the tab heading "My Feeds." Four feeds? The site automatically added its own internal feed so that you can stay informed about its new features. But the three sites you just subscribed to should also be listed. The numbers in parentheses show how many new items are contained in each feed awaiting your perusal. So let's peruse.

Click on "Smartmoney.com." In the column on the right side of the page, under the Smartmoney.com title you should now see a listing of items. (If you don't see a bunch of items, scroll to the bottom of the page, and change the "Display" options until you do.) Each item includes a title that carries a link and, under the title, a brief description in plain text. That's what every item in an RSS feed contains: title, link, and description.
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Step 3: Scan and Drill Down
This concise list of titles and descriptions enables you to quickly scan for items of interest. If one hooks your interest, you can simply click on the headline to see the full version of the content. Let's try it.

When we recently checked the Smartmoney feed we were drawn to an item with this headline and description:

"The Wired Help: Spring cleaning will be a breeze with these robotic vacuums, floor scrubbers, lawn mowers and more."

When we clicked on the headline, a new browser window opened instantly and we were able to read the full article. Not coincidentally, we were now on the Smartmoney.com site. Try it yourself by clicking on one of the headlines that interests you.

A few significant things just happened there. From your Bloglines page, you were able to quickly review a bunch of brief items in the Smartmoney.com feed. Then when you chose an item for a closer look, you traveled to the site where the feed originated. Once there, if Smartmoney.com is as smart as it ought to be, you may well have seen other items that tempted you to linger and explore the site further.

In other words, when you're consuming information, an RSS reader makes it easy for you to look over the top-line descriptions of offerings from your various feeds and drill down selectively. Equally significant, for publishers of Web content, RSS feeds can act as well-baited hooks that draw users into their sites.

So far, we've looked at only one feed, but you've got two more waiting to be reviewed. Take a minute to explore the items in your other feeds before we move on. On the left hand side of your Bloglines page, just click on either "Rolling Stone Music News" or "NYT > Technology."

How long were you gone? Once you get comfortable with an RSS reader, it's easy to get lost along many interesting avenues. It doesn't help that you can add as many feeds as you like to your reader. (Beware RSS overload; we suggest you start with no more than five to 10 feeds.)
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Step 4: Many Ways to Subscribe
How do you subscribe to additional feeds? Here are the easiest ways. At the top of the large, right-side column, click on the "Directory" tab. There Bloglines offers different collections of feeds to choose from, including the "Quick Picks" that we started with as well as the more comprehensive, alphabetical "Feed Directory." You can also "Search All Blogs" (which really means search all feeds) for specific keywords or subject areas.

In most cases, Bloglines lets you preview a feed before you decide whether to add it to your list. To add a feed, just click on the "Subscribe" button or link. At that point, Bloglines shows you a brief description of the feed and lets you set various options for how it should be displayed. We recommend you just go with the default settings, and click on the "Subscribe" button one more time to seal the deal.

There are other ways to subscribe. Many Web sites promote their RSS feeds with little orange icons labeled "RSS" or "XML." If you find yourself on such a site and you click on the icon, it will take you to an ugly page full of XML code that no mortal should ever have to look at. The trick is to copy the URL (Web address) of that page and paste it into a subscription window on the Bloglines site. Let's try it.

Let's go PCWorld.com's RSS page in a separate browser by clinking on this link: PCWorld.com's RSS feeds. (If that doesn't open a new browser automatically, you'll have to start one up manually and go to this Web address:
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/rss/0,00.asp.)

See all the little orange icons labeled "XML"? Click on that first one, for "Latest News," and you'll see one of those ugly pages we warned you about. Ignore most of it, but go up to the address window where you see "http://rss.pcworld.com/rss/latestnews.rss." Select and copy that address, then bring up the browser that's showing Bloglines.

Under Bloglines' "My Feeds" tab, click on "Add." The right-side column should now be showing an empty box titled "Blog or Feed URL." Put your cursor inside that box and insert (paste) the Web address from the ugly page. Then click the "Subscribe" button.

Next, Bloglines shows you a brief description of the PCWorld Latest News feed and lets you review the display options. Leave the settings alone for now, and click on "Subscribe" again. Voila. "PCWorld.com - Latest News Stories" is now an additional feed listed under the "My Feeds" tab on the left side of the Bloglines page.

There are still more ways to subscribe to feeds using Bloglines. You can add a "Subscribe to Bloglines" button to your Web browser's toolbar, which automates the process quite a bit. (See "Extras" at the bottom of Bloglines' left-side column.) And on the occasional Web site, you may find—in addition to the mysterious orange "XML" icons—an icon that says something like "Subscribe with Bloglines." See, for example, the Christian Science Monitor's RSS page. If you are already registered with Bloglines, clicking on that button gets the subscription process rolling automatically, and without subjecting you to XML code.

By the way, did you notice the Yahoo and Google icons on that Christian Science Monitor page? They're the subject of the second half of this do-it-yourself guide. Before you leave Bloglines, you might try out the "Edit" functions (under the "My Feeds" tab) that let you expand and contract your feed lists within customized folders. The ability of a stand-alone feed reader to help you organize all this information in an orderly fashion is a major advantage over the simpler, more mainstream tools we're about to explore.

Reminder: From now on, you can read your Bloglines feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. Just go to http://www.bloglines.com/, and remember to log in.
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PART 2: PERSONAL START PAGES

Step 1: Register with My Yahoo
Not everyone on the Internet is a power user. Many folks would rather not add another program to the list of things they have to learn and keep track of. And while they probably would appreciate knowing about new content on a few favorite Web sites, they don't need to set up feeds from 10 or 20 or 50 different sources.

For these users—and there are a lot of them on the Web—there is a new trend that allows them to "add content" to the personal start pages that are offered free from Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, etc. Although the user-friendly process is powered by RSS feeds, in many cases the users are happily ignorant of that.

Let's add some feeds to My Yahoo, a typical personal start page that regular folks use to look at a standard menu of news headlines, weather, and such.

If you're not already registered, you'll need to do that. Go to the My Yahoo main page (http://my.yahoo.com/index.html) and click on the link that says "New User? Sign Up." You'll be given a choice of a few large interest areas to get your content started: We suggest you select only one—"News"—in order to keep the page roomy enough for the custom feeds you'll be adding in a little bit. Click "Save."

The site will prompt you again to sign up, then ask you to fill out a registration form, pick a user ID and password, and go through all the usual setup stuff. As in the previous process with Bloglines (described above), you'll have to respond to a confirmation e-mail. Eventually, you'll sign in and arrive at your My Yahoo page.
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Step 2: Feed My Yahoo
Note the little blue "Add Content" link near the top of the page (just below the Search box). Here's where things get interesting. Click on "Add Content"...

The next page provides several different ways to "add content" to your personal page. Under "Browse by Topic," click on the link labeled "Entertainment & Arts." Scroll down the list of popular offerings in this category to find something of interest. On our recent test drive, we zeroed in on "PEOPLE Magazine: Top Headlines." Click on the "Add" button next to the entry for People (or whatever strikes your fancy), and then click the "Finished" button at the bottom of the page.

You should now be looking at a modified My Yahoo page, with headlines in your newly-selected topic added to the pre-existing headlines. Your new stuff is at the bottom; you can change its location by clicking on the "Edit" button. Nobody mentioned an RSS feed, but that's essentially what delivers those headlines (and the description that appears when you roll over each headline). Pretty painless, eh?

Just as in any RSS reader, if you click on a headline you are taken to the parent publishing site for a full version of the content. In our example, we clicked on the headline "Richard Dreyfuss Marries," and were whisked off to read the full story, complete with photos, on People.com.

But maybe you'd like to add headlines from an RSS source that's not on Yahoo's most popular lists. Say you're interested in feeds on the topic of online journalism. Click on the "Add Content" link again (near the top of the page), type "online journalism" into the "FIND" box, and click on the "Find" button. Let's select the Online Journalism Review by clicking the "Add" button next to that source. Scroll down and click "Finished."

Voila again! The Online Journalism Review has been added as a news category to your personal page (at the bottom), and below it are recent headlines. As before, this is powered by an RSS feed from the journalism site—but we didn't have to get our hands dirty with any of that.
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Step 3: Look for the Icons
If you're lucky enough to find yourself on a Web site festooned with buttons that say "Add to My Yahoo" (and you're already signed up for a My Yahoo page), one click will start a user-friendly process to add the site's feed to your personal page. Try it from that Christian Science Monitor RSS page.

My Yahoo can even cope with that most geeky method of subscribing to a feed, the one that starts with your discovery of a little orange "XML" or "RSS" icon on a site you're visiting. You would click on the icon, copy the URL (Web address) from the site's ugly XML page, and then copy it into Yahoo's special "Add RSS by URL" box, which is not all that easy to find. Start at your My Yahoo page, click the "Add Content" link (near the top), then next to the "Find" button click on the link "Add RSS by URL."

Clearly, Yahoo doesn't expect most of its users to subscribe this way. Why should they when there are so many simpler methods?

Simplicity, in fact, is the main advantage of viewing RSS feeds through personal pages such as My Yahoo. Although personal pages let you move your various feeds around on the page and even collapse or expand the listing of headlines, they are best suited to the casual reader of a modest number of feeds. For anyone who wants to keep up with new content on lots of Web sites in many different categories, the stand-alone feed reader is a more useful tool.

Now that you've had a taste of RSS feeds in these two settings, we hope you'll choose one and keep exploring. And continue to think about the benefits of RSS from both ends of the feed—the user who consumes the information and the publisher who "broadcasts" it.
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