How to read sites that syndicate their content with RSS or Atom:
Atom and RSS are really useful for keeping up with blogs and news sites. If you're using Firefox or Safari, they already have the ability to subscibe to any site implementing feeds.
But they actually aren't the best way to do it (IMHO, they suck). If you're using Firefox, however, install [urel=
http://sage.mozdev.org/]Sage[/url], and all will be beautiful. The site has complete instructions on how to use it.
If you're using something else, you have two choices. You can install a program called a "feed reader," or you can use an online reader.
There's tons of feed reader applications out there, but I won't go in to detail about them. If you're interested in going that route, just do a search for feed reader, or aggregator (which is the technical name).
So... what I recommend for starting out is using an online feed reader. The two biggest, and probably the best choices are
Bloglines and
Google Reader.
Bloglines allows you to share your subscriptions with other people. That is, you can choose to make your subscription list public so that other people can see what you like. I don't think this feature is all that great. There's a lot of other stuff Bloglines can do that's pretty neat, but to be honest, once the initial "oh cool" factor wears off, the features are pretty useless. It's also a bit harder to "learn" because of all the features. The one very cool thing about it, however, is that a lot of sites have a "Subscribe via Bloglines" button already on them. But... not all of them.
Google Read, n the other hand is pretty straight forward. If you've used Gmail, you'll pretty much understand Reader.
So... I guess in the final analysis, my suggestion for anyone just wanting to see what all the fuss is about is that they try out Google reader.
Sign up for an account (you probably already have one and don't realize it, though... especially if you have Gmail). Check out their
help section and grab some feeds.
Reader makes it really simple. If you're not sure if a site has a feed or not, you can click on "Add Feed" in reader and then just put the main URL or even just the name of the site. Reader will most likely find the feed.
Sometimes, however, it doesn't. A good example is that Xanga does it's feeds really weird, so Reader will fail to find it if you just put in:
http://www.xanga.com/v25/
if you just add "rss" to thend of a xanga URL, though, it will work:
http://www.xanga.com/v25/rss
For other things that don't seem to work, the best thing to do is to find a button or link on the site in question that says something along the lines of RSS, or XML, or Atom (these are often rectangular, orange buttons), or "Subscribe to the feed," etc. Find that link, right click on it, selc "Copy link" (or whatever it is that your browser says... could be "Copy address," "Copy Url," "Copy Link Location..."), and then past that in to Reader's Add Subscription box.
It's really, very, very simple. Play with reader for awhile, and you'll fall in love with feeds.
Maybe soon, I'll write up a thing on how to subscribe to podcasts in iTunes... It'll change your life.