RSS Feeds – Let Us Learn the Facts

What is RSS? To begin with, it’s one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. However it is not so.

The easiest way to explain it is to make you understand a live example. We are not trying to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

Let’s sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don’t block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

Let’s walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, or even if you don’t have one you can go to My Yahoo! and click the Add Content page. On the right side of the ‘Find Content’ area you will see a link, Add RSS by URL. Follow that link and, to add the Excess Voice RSS feed, simply paste this url in the field option, http://www.excessvoice.com/excessfeed.xml (Don’t click on this link. Cut and paste it.).

Now click the Add button and you’re done.

If you don’t use Yahoo!, register at Bloglines.com and follow the same process. Bloglines is a free service preferred by many users.

What happens now?

Now, whenever you go to My Yahoo! or Bloglines, you will see when the Excess Voice feed has been updated. In Yahoo it tells you how many hours or days ago the search rss feeds was updated. In Bloglines the feed name will appear in bold, and a number displayed after the name tells you how many items the feed has been updated since you last checked. (Bloglines is one such service.)

What you see…

When you check the Excess Voice feeds, you will see that with each feed, you don’t get the complete content…you don’t see the whole newsletter, the complete article or the whole review. You see the title and the first ten lines of the content. If you want to read the whole article, for example, click on the link and then it will navigate to the page on the Excess Voice site.