I get this question from a lot of people who are excited about setting up their very own blog, so I thought it was high time we set the record straight.
{found on 250 RSS Feeds Every Web Designer and Graphic Designer Should Subscribe to}
An RSS feed for your blog is kind of like a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed – basically, it’s a means of feeding your blog content {posts} to the people who want to read it. People who read blogs often read quite a few, so it’s a way to make your content easily accessible to those people by allowing them to add your blog to their reader. It’s almost like a magazine subscription, but it’s normally free and new content shows up all the time in digital form.
Okay, so got that part, what’s a reader? If you use Gmail, you can use Google Reader, and then whenever you’re on a blog you like, you can usually find the little RSS icon, click it, Google Reader will pop up, and you can simply click “subscribe.”
So then when you’re having your coffee in the morning, you can pull up your reader and see all the new posts on all your favorite blogs at once. (Just realized I’m a bad example, because I didn’t put an RSS icon on my site, but if you want to subscribe, click here.)
The other option is to subscribe to the feed via email (which can be done to the left). You’ll get an email when there’s new content on the blog.
So, do you write a blog and want to know what good RSS is for you? Well, it’s a great measure of what kind of readership you’re getting on your blog.
There are a variety of ways to setup your feed, and most blogs have one built in, but I personally like to use Feedburner. It’s another glorious Google product, so while I’m in my email, I can head on over to feedburner.com and quickly and easily see what my readership stats look like today.
So, to set up your feed, head to www.feedburner.com, add your site address, and simply follow the steps to get it all taken care of!
