Subscribing to blogs
September 8, 2007 8:10 am Daily lifeThis is for Erin and Mark and anyone else who was interested.
I use the RSS feed reader in Outlook 2007 – which I really like and highly recommend, much to the dismay of the rabid anti-microsoft lobby. Just don’t enable the computer wide instant search feature if you are running an XP machine, and you’ll be fine. That’s the one thing that will dog your computer down. The other features are oh, so wonderful.
For those that don’t have this, I’m going to give a list of email based Aggregators. What’s an aggregator?
Why email based? That’s my method of choice. I prefer to receive an email when one of my favorite blogs gets a new post. It helps me to get more work done and go about my day – I don’t waste time checking blogs that don’t have anything new that day.
There are plenty of other methods- see the section “Varieties” in the What’s an aggregator? link. Choose the one that works best for you.
But first: if the letters RSS mean nothing to you, click here.
Learn to find RSS feeds. It’s simple. look for this icon 
or a little orange button with the letters RSS or XML in it. Go ahead, click on it- the page you end up on is the feed.
Alternate method: if you are using Internet Explorer, (which I also do not consider to be evil) and you are using version 6, go ahead and upgrade to 7. You will like the tabbed browsing, something Mozilla has had for a long time now. It also reads CSS better, meaning that some websites that look all wrong to you now will suddenly seem to work. (like Paul’s blog before he added some tables in deference to you IE6 users). Ok, so lets assume you are now using IE7.
When you are on a blog site, look over by the printer and home icons on the top right. The RSS feed icon is now active; this site has a feed and you can subscribe. Click on that icon to see the feed. It will look like this:
Mozilla Firefox also auto detects feeds. You’ll see the orange icon in the bottom right part of the Mozilla Firefox browser window (the status bar), or if you are using version 1.5 or newer, in the right most part of the address bar.
Email based aggregators
These are sites that aggregate feeds and email them to you.
Blog Alert
FeedBlitz.com - scroll down to the section titled: Subscribe to any blog by mail
RssFwd
R-mail
Yahoo! Alerts
Have fun!
