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 In At The Bleep EndThursday, April 21, 2005
RSS/Atom feeds For readers new to blogs, or who haven't caught onto RSS/Atom feeds yet: Blogs can be syndicated, which means if you have feed reading software you can make new posts from your favourite blogs automatically download to your machine as if they were emails. This is a good thing because it saves you having to re-visit sites to see if there's anything new. Interested? If you want to get full benefit from feeds then you'll need either a dedicated Feed Reader or an email client that also handles feeds. Feed Reader is a dedicated, er, feed reader. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and is free. Thunderbird, the email client not the cheap and nasty wine, is the most elegant free solution. Brought to you by Mozilla, of Firefox fame, this email client lets you view your email, blog feeds and newsgroup subscriptions all in one place. It also includes very handy junk mail filtering. To set up a RSS/Atom feeds account in Thunderbird... Tools > Account Settings > Add Account > RSS News & Blogs Once you are set up with a feed reader, you just need to find some feeds. The easiest way is probably to look for something like this... To get this feed link into Thunderbird, right-click it, and either 'copy shortcut' in Explorer or 'copy link location' in Firefox. Open Thunderbird, then... Right-click your RSS/Atom account > Manage subscriptions > Add ...and paste the copied link into the 'feed url' box. If you use Firefox you will see a special icon appear in the right-side of your browser status bar whenever you are on a site with a feed.  To transfer this feed into your feed reader... 1. Click the icon > subscribe to the feed > save it somewhere in your bookmarks 2. Find it in your bookmarks > Right-click it > Properties > Copy the 'feed location' and paste into Thunderbird etc as above. |
