Using a Website RSS Reader

In my last post, I talked about what RSS is and how it can be a very good way to monitor a website where you want to know when there are changes made.  In general, there are three main ways to read RSS feeds.  They are:

• Websites
• Add-ons to your browser
• Standalone programs

I’m going to show some readers, this is by no means all of them, and I don’t want to suggest that these are the best (they are good but there are others just as good).  As with other parts of the blog, I’m aiming to show you what can be done, then you can go decide how you want to do it.

I am curious to hear what RSS reader you do use, so please let me know in the comments section.

In this post, we are going to talk about websites that allow you to read RSS feeds.  Websites have the advantage of being able to be used anywhere, you don’t need to be on your own PC, however, you do need to have an internet connection in order to read them (i.e. you can’t read them offline).

Web Sites

Yahoo.com

I’m going to start with the one that I first worked with – Yahoo.com.  To work with this website (and most others), you need to create an account.  In Yahoo’s case, after you create an account, you then go to http://my.yahoo.com , which is your personalized main page.

If you want to add an RSS feed, all you have to do is click on the “Add Content” button, and then the “Add RSS Feed” button.  Enter the full URL of the feed and you are all set.

In some cases, the website that you are trying to add the XML feed from will have a “My Yahoo” button.  If it does, then things are even easier, just click the button, your My Yahoo page will come up asking you to confirm that you want to add the content.  This is from the CNN feed page:

Google Reader

A lot of people speak very highly of Google’s RSS reader.  Assuming you have created a Google account, you can get to the reader here.

You add subscriptions the same way that you do for Yahoo, click on the “Add a subscription” button and then enter the feed.

One nice feature is that you can enter a search term and the reader will return feeds that match the terms, then you can subscribe to them.

Other Websites

There are a lot of other news aggregator sites that combine a bunch of modules with RSS feeds.  Here are a couple of the more popular:

• Netvibes
• Bloglines