MediaJoltz

So many blog pages to visit, so little time. Have you found yourself visiting specific websites of your favorite blogs to see if there is a new one posted yet? There is an easier way to do this and the analogy of how this works is just like getting a newspaper delivered to your doorstep each morning.

When someone has a blog, they allow their listeners to “subscribe” to their media just as one would subscribe to the newspaper. This is done by using RSS or “Really Simple Syndication.” Actually if you don’t understand code, its not very simple-but thanks to our geek friends, they have made it as simple as clicking a button.

You can find the subscribe on anyone’s page, but it might come in different forms. The universal “subscribe to RSS” button looks like an orange square button:

but it might also come in the form of:

No matter the look of the “subscribe to RSS” button, once you click on it, it will add the website you subscribed to, to an agregator: a place that gathers all new episodes or posts. One of the more popular ones is Google Reader. I use NetNewsWire because I am on a MAC.

Once you click on this button the website will be loaded into your aggregator, and then every time a new post or episode is available, your computer will be notified and your computer will downloaded it. Thats it, so everytime I want to find out if any of the blogs I read have a new post I go to my aggregator:

I just hit refresh all and if there are any new posts, my computer gets it for me. No more surfing to each and every website-which saves me time to do more important things, like blog!

Here is a video that does a good job of describing RSS and how it works: It is called RSS in Plain English