A Primer on RSS

There are still a lot of people that have no idea what RSS is or why this little orange box image keeps showing up on most blogs.

This image: (or some variation of it)

What is RSS?

Essentially what most people really need to know is it is a “page” for people add to some reader so the reader can automatically get the latest updates to a site or pieces of information. In the case of a blog you would add the URL of an rss feed (for example: http://www.dumbotaku.com/feed/) to a reader. The reader will check every 30 minutes or once a day for the latest updates on the feed that the site generates and gives the updates to you.

In other words it helps you get content brought to you instead of you going to get content on websites. It is very convenient if you have a lot of websites you read everyday, but would save time if you didn’t have to actually visit the site. So now you have the “what” lets look at how to use RSS.

How to use RSS

There are many applications that you can use to subscribe to RSS feeds. Probably the most used from talking to people is Google Reader. So, lets go through quickly how to use it. (With pictures)

Step 1) Visit http://google.com/reader if you have an account sign in. If you don’t click on create account. It is simple and takes very little time.

Step 2) Be sure to sign-in. Once you are signed in you should see something like the image below.

Step 3) Now lets get the url of the RSS Feed. Normally you will want to do like the image below. Find the RSS Icon right-click and hit “copy link location” button. In your case just select and copy this url

http://www.dumbotaku.com/feed/

Step 4) Now we need to add that url (http://www.dumbotaku.com/feed/) to Google Reader. Go back to it and at the top left should be a subscribe button.

Step 5) When you click that a little box will open up right under it just paste the url in there and click on add

Step 6) Now you are subscribed to the rss feed. Just login once a day or every couple of days. To see what all feeds you are subscribed to look at the left side of the page.

Step 7) To see what the content is in that feed look at the right side of the page.

Now What?

Now you are using an RSS feed reader. No you can just open that up to read DumbOtaku.com content. Now try going and adding other sites/blogs that have RSS feeds on them to your feed reader. Also play with Google Reader a bit. Add several feeds and play around with using it and ready the content. To get you on your way here are some blogs you might want to add. Check them out.

• Yonasu
• Jamaipanese
• Kiss-Sui(Her button is at the very bottom)
• Danny Choo
• The Nihon Sun

I hope this has helped some of you that might not have known what an RSS feed is or how to use it. Once you get a better handle on use them they become addictive. So have fun consuming content faster with RSS.

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