Web In Depth

All right today is an action day. I want to briefly talk about different feed readers and then give you one on one on how to sign up to my favorite feed reader.

So as you already know feed readers are the software or programme that’s capable of reading the feed. The exact detail of how this is done is irrelevant to the end user. There are many feed readers available for use. They fall in to two categories

1. Offline feed readers
2. Online feed readers

The best know Offline feed readers are NewsCrawler and Feed Demon. These have to be downloaded as software and installed in your computer and then used as a normal programme. The online feed readers are web sites that offer feed aggregation service. The two best know of these are Bloglines and Google reader. There are many others as well, but most of them have similar functionality and interface.

My favorite Feed aggregator is Bloglines. I have found it to be quite simple to use and has all the necessary facilities. It is actually the most popular online feed reader and maybe the most popular overall. So how can you join Bloglines and use it to read feeds. Simply follow my step by step process.

1. Go to www.bloglines.com

2. This is the welcome page of bloglines. To sign up just click on the “sign up now it’s free” link. Now you will be taken to a standard web form where you have to only give a valid email address and a password. Click Register and you are done. Only think left is to confirm the sign up using a verification email they will send to your email.

Verification is done by clicking the link they have given in there email. Well that’s it you have successfully taken the first step in using the power of RSS.

3. This is the page that will normally display when you have logged into the Bloglines Reader.

As you can see there are several options on the left hand side of the screen. What we are interested know is on feeds so click on that and presto there you can see all the feeds you have subscribed to including the ones I selected at the signup process.

Let me just take you to my feed and you can see some other sites I have subscribed to, and hear is something new which we will go to more detail later, a feed on firefox from Google news.

Now how that’s done well I’ll explain in the next post. But I hope you get an idea as to what sort of different information sources you can subscribe to.

There is lot more to talk on using bloglines including things like clippings. I also want to give some insight into one more feed reader just so you have more options. Anyway that’s coming in another post, enough had been said by me its time for you to go and join bloglines. If you know how to subscribe to a feed subscribe to my feed here at webindepth but if you are new to all these just hang on, I’ll explain everything.