HOW TO SUBSCRIBE TO RSS AND SAVE TIME

Well so far I have covered the following topics in this series on RSS and web feeds.

Web feeds
Syndication
RSS versions and Atom
RSS readers and joining Bloglines.

Today I want to tell you how to subscribe for an RSS feed. Let me give you the step by step process.

Go to the web site you want to subscribe to. ( a no-brainer)
Look around for the following

Any words like RSS, XML, Web feed, Feed or any combination.
The following symbol and its related variants. This symbol is the standard for the web feed with its orange square and radio waves in white. This can vary as you may see circles instead of square and sometimes in different color. But almost always the radio waves will be there.

A bit of advice for webmasters and users. If you are a webmaster please provide a visible standard symbol in a prominent place in your site so that visitors can see it clearly as only then they will be compelled to use it. If you are a user and you like the content the easiest method is to look at the location bar to see if the browser does show a feed. This way you can join the feed without trying to find the symbol or link.

Now the only thing you have to do is to click on the RSS text or symbol (if clickable) or on the symbol in the location bar which will take you to a page that you can use to subscribe with your favorite reader. (I hope you read my earlier post and already signed up or installed your reader of choice. If not read How to sign up to receive feeds )
This is where things can get complicated. The page you will be taken to depends on several factors.

If it is Firefox browser you will be taken to a custom page which allows you to choose your reader. It will detect if you have any readers installed.

If the site is using Feedburner (a cool RSS management service that I will review later) then you will be directed to the following page that is a Feedburner standard interface. This also gives you choice to select your reader.

If you have set the browser preferences to you default reader then it will take you to the reader page (if online) or open the reader (if desktop).

If none of this is there then what you will open in the browser is the actual XML page at that link. This will have code that is total mambo jumbo for the user. Don’t panic, if this occurs go back to the web page and then copy the link and paste it into your reader. Most readers will have instructions on doing this and some may have even more advanced methods.

My advice to you is first setup your reader and then set it as default in your browser. This will save any hassle later on.

I hope things are crystal clear. I will try to come up with a screencast to explain this by showing how I do it. If you have any questions please ask. Most importantly the only way to learn anything is do it yourself, so go to my RSS button and subscribe to WebInDepth feed and experience RSS first hand.

ANNEX

Auto Discovery

Quoting the Microsoft RSS guide:

“In order to tell IE (and other browsers, for that matter), that your page has an associated feed, you need to add a link element inside the header of your web page. This helps users discover that that the page has an associated feed to which they can subscribe.

Here is an example of RSS autodiscovery (use for both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0):

<html>
<head>
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”your feed title here” href=”http://www.company.com/feedurl.rss“>
</head>
<body>
…

Here is an example of Atom Autodiscovery:

<html>
<head>
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”your feed title here” href= “http://www.company.com/feedurl.xml”>
</head>
<body>
…

Put the title of your feed in the title attribute and the URL to the feed itself in the href attribute.

So users the only thing you should know is this allows for browser to find a feed in a web site. For webmasters please put up the above code to make your site more user friendly.