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All your news in one place – RSS Readers

A chance conversation with a professor the other week reminded me of my search for the perfect RSS (rich site summary) reader. Rather than opening up 4 windows every morning to check my news I want 1. I have found a solution.

feedly before

So what is this RSS business?

Well..there is something called an ‘RSS feed’. For a newspaper this feed would contain their articles in a simplified format with information like the author, date/time of publishing, some images and maybe some tags pertaining to the content. This feed would update itself as and when new articles were added. To take another example, the RSS feed of my blog would be a collection of my posts. Now most publishing bodies with a web presence have an RSS feed and many will actually have multiple so for example the BBC has an RSS feed for world news, UK news, sports news etc.. With an RSS reader you can subscribe to all the RSS feeds that interest you and all the information will be displayed in a user friendly interface.

This is the logo for RSS feeds, you may have seen it around:

feedly RSS logo

ENTER Feedly (www.feedly.com)

Feedly is a well functioning and great looking way of gathering all your news. It lives on the internet and you can download an app for it if you have a tablet or smart phone. I have set as my home page so it is the first thing that opens and I can navigate to it easily by pressing the home button in my browser. You  sign up for it with a google account.

feedly home
As you can see from the picture above I have about 9 feeds that I am following but obviously you can have as many as you want. You can add categories as I have like News, Tech, Blog like. These can all be selected individually to see only the feeds in that tag.

It is very easy to add feeds you simply click on the +add content button in the top left hand side of the page and search for what you’re looking for and then title it and add a category – if you want. You don’t even have to leave the page.

feedly add content

If feedly is unable to find the RSS feed your looking for you can just google it or visit the website of the source you would like and search RSS feed there. They usually come in the form of a URL. For example the RSS feed for this blog which is unfortunately not read by 155,000 people will not appear in a search but you can copy the URL of the feed straight into the search box: www.chikaboo-designs.com/feed/.

If you are convinced, may I cheekily suggest that you take your first step into the RSS world by adding my website to your feedly.

 

2 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

Krigereply
31st October 2013 at 8:39 am

Feedly is the best!! Any idea why google discontinued google reader? I really liked it!

chikabooreply
31st October 2013 at 9:38 am
– In reply to: Krige

I have the feeling that people think RSS feeds are dead, I mean I don’t know many people who use them. I think they’re great though and they still seem to work so…

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