How To Subscribe To The Soccer Blog.

So what is RSS?  That’s a question I hear a lot.  Well, it is a topic that unfortunately isn’t always fully understood or appreciated. I have found that once someone takes the time to explain simply what it is and what it can do for you, people have that “ah ha” moment and the penny drops very quickly. This is then usually followed by a small helping of remorse and comments like, “why the hell haven’t I been using this before?”  So I though it would be a good idea to simply explain what RSS is and what those buttons at the top right of the page are and what they can do for you.

Ask yourself, do you want to kept up to date with the latest posts on The Soccer Blog as soon as I post them? I hope so! If you do, you need to know what RSS is and how to use it. Don’t worry, it really isn’t that difficult.

At The Soccer Blog we have provided you with a number of ways that you can subscribe to the site and receive updates as and when we post new articles. The main way we can do this for you is through our RSS feed.

What is RSS?

Put simply, RSS is a technology that is used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites, such as The Soccer Blog. It stands for Really Simple Syndication.

In the ‘old days’ of the internet if you wanted to keep up to date with what was going on with such a website as this, you had to ‘bookmark’ the site and then remember to come back to manually check if anything new articles or content had been posted. How tedious was that! You had to:

• do all the work
• it started to get very complicated when you started trying to keep track with a lot of sites
• it was very easy to miss articles you should have enjoyed, simply because you either forgot to check your bookmarks or you simply forgot
• if you did keep going back to your bookmarked sites and they hadn’t updated very often, you just kept seeing the same stuff over and over. That’s just as bad as not seeing it at all

Those Days Are Well And Truly Gone

RSS takes all this and consigns it to the scrap heap of history. Because now you can tell a website to let you know every time that they post a new article, add more content.

RSS flips things around a little and is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.

Why not think of it as subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you whenever the magazine writes a new article. The only difference is that is isn’t delivered in you post, it is delivered to the RSS Reader of your choice

The technology that allows all this to happen behind the scenes isn’t a subject for this article. Let’s just say you probably don’t know how the engine in your car works but you know it starts when you put the key in the ignition and turn it.

Please be reassured, you do not have to be some sort of computer genius to use RSS. Like anything in life, doing something for the first time may seems a little strange, but believe me once you start using RSS you’ll wonder how you ever coped with simple boring old bookmarking!

How to Use RSS

Get an RSS Reader - The first thing you need to do is get yourself an RSS Feer Reader or sometimes known as an Aggregator.

No need to get too carried away when you are just starting out, so a good place to start would be to look at a couple of web based readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. There are numerous readers out there but these will work perfectly well for you.

I’m presuming you are familiar with using email. Good, because these Readers work just like your email inbox. Entries you have subscribed to that you haven’t read yet will be in Bold, just like a new email. Clicking on the entry allows you to see the latest article from the site you subscribed to. You can then either go directly to the site or move on to the next entry.

How To Subscribe

You will no doubt have noticed as you surf the internet that sites are now using a whole array of images and buttons, like the little orange square at the top of this article. These little images now come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You can see the ones I have made available on The Soccer Blog by clicking on the Subscribe Button at the top right of the page. You will see a lot of the following:

Whenever you see one of these little buttons it simply means that the site publishes a feed which will allow you to subscribe. It can be as simple as copy the link associated with that feed and pasting into your Reader, like Google Reader or Bloglines or clicking the image or button and following the instructions.

Subscribe From Your Browser

If you are using a modern browser to surf the internet, you may notice that you actually have a little orange RSS icon or a little blue box with “RSS” in white letters built into the address bar. If you do, you can simply click on that whenever you are reading a website you want to subscribe to. To allow you to do this from your browser, make sure you first update your Preferences

To quickly and easily subscribe by clicking these icons you’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice as by default they will probably subscribe you using the in-browser reader. You can do this by going to the ‘preferences’ or “Internet Tools” depending on your browser and set your favourite RSS Feed Reader as you default. Then once you click on the RSS icon you will be taken directly to your Reader to set up your new feed.

Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

Use Email If You Don’t want to Use an RSS Reader?

If the above just sounds like too much hard work, don’t dispair. Many sites like us here at The Soccer Blog also allow you to subscribe to our RSS feed via your normal email inbox.

Once you have placed your cursor over or clicked on the Subscribe button at the top right of this page, you will see the familiar little “envelope” icon that is used for an email. Simply click on this, enter your email address and when we post a new article you will receive it in your inbox, easy! Don’t worry, if you prefer to use this option, you can unsubscribe at anytime and as always YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT to us. Your email address entered will not be given to any third party for any reason whatsoever, ever! It is always kept private and not used for any other purposes than to send you the RSS updates. That’s it, I promise!

I hope you found this article helpful and you start using RSS to keep up to date with all your favourite blogs and websites, like The Soccer Blog!

Take care and I look forward to sending you your RSS updates from The Soccer Blog soon.

Rik
The Soccer Blogger

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