Using RSS and Social Bookmarks
What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to receive updates made on your favourite websites instead of having to actually go there to check.
Using RSS to receive new content:
To receive these content updates (or feeds) you will need a ‘feed reader’. There are many available but I use the appropriately named ‘feedreader’. To subscribe to a feed manually you must paste the link to the RSS file from the website into your reader. Alternatively, many browsers now have inbuilt feed reading facilities.
The links to my various blog feeds are each listed alongside the (no doubt familiar) RSS icon in the footer of my pages.
Using social bookmarks:
Social bookmarking is a handy way to save and organise interesting pages and sites you find whilst browsing. The advantages over saving bookmarks directly into your browser are threefold:
- You save them online (to a bookmarking website) so you can access them from any computer
- You can search through bookmarks which other users have posted. The most popular usually appear on the site’s homepage so you can quickly gauge what’s topical each day.
- You can use tagging to organise the posts. For instance, if you were to save this page you might want to write the tags ‘bookmarking’ and ‘howto’. On delicious.com, I have numerous pages divided between tags such as ‘webdesign’, ‘css’ and ‘javascript’.
How to save a social bookmark:
At the bottom of the main pages on this site you’ll see a number of colourful icons. These refer to an array of different social bookmarking and social news sites. If you have already signed up to any of these sites, saving one of my pages should be as simple as clicking the appropriate icon. This will take you to their site and populate the title for the page automatically. Simply fill out the remaining form fields (for tags / comments etc).
For pages that do not include the ‘social bookmark links’, just copy the URL out of the address bar, go to your bookmarking site of choice and save the link manually.
I cannot recommend social bookmarking highly enough and, if you save my pages to your account (even just to test the technology out), you’ll be doing me a big favour by increasing my incoming links / traffic. Thanks!