How to set up an RSS feed, and what you are missing if you don’t.

One our customers responded to my earlier mystification as to why more people don’t subscribe to the blog instead of or in addition to the email newsletter.

Her answer was that she didn’t know how to.

So, here are some instructions.

First, you have to set up a blog reader. It’s easy and it does not require any of your hard drives storage capacity.

There are several. I will recommend the one I use because I “know” it.

It’s Bloglines.

Simply go to http://www.bloglines.com.

When the page comes up, click on “register”.

You will receive a “Create an account” page that will ask for your email address, a password, a time zone and your language preference.

Click on the register button.

You will see a page that asks you to confirm your sign by responding to an email message.

You will also see a panel to the left of the page. It has four tabs at the top. You may want click on any of them, but the one you want for blog feeds is “feeds”.

When you click on that after you have confirmed your sign-up, you will get a list of all the blogs to which you have subscribed. The number in bold type will represent blog messages that you have not yet read. When you click on the blog link, the blog text will appear in the right-hand panel. Clicking on the headline will open the actual blog for you.

But first, you can click on “Download Notifier”. You will see a page that says you can download the notifier to your computer based on your browser. Click on the appropriate browser download.

You will receive some choices and warnings. I recommend you choose save (to your desktop).

After download, the “B” icon will appear on your toolbar. When a red nib appears on it, it is telling you there are unread new blogs among your chosen feeds. If you click on the “B” icon, you will go to the Bloglines page with the feeds panel.

Sounds complicated but it is not. Congratulations!! You now have a blog reader.

Next step is subscribing to a blog.

You do this by clicking on the orange RSS icon on any blog to which you want to subscribe. You will get a panel with several blog readers to send your subscription to. Click on the Bloglines icon. You will go to a Bloglines page that will allow you to subscribe to that blog.

An alternative way to subscribe is to click on the “subscribe” button and enter the address of the blog you want to subscribe to. In the case of Tribal Artery, enter http://tribalartery.blogspot.com .

moreless