Recently I added an email subscribe feature over on this blog’s sidebar after I read that a large number of people still are not familiar with RSS, XML, readers and aggregators. So now those readers who prefer email updates of this blog’s content can to receive them by easily subscribing via email. It’s simple and no feed reader is required. See Subscribe Me! on the sidebar.
For those of you unfamiliar with feeds and readers, a feed reader is used for reading and organizing RSS or Atom feeds of syndicated content. (RSS has the widest acceptance of any feed format, but Atom is much more robust and feature-rich than RSS.) Techcrunch has a feature comparsion chart of online feed readers. Currently I use Bloglines. Another feed reader that was reviewed, Rojo, looks interesting.
I haven’t tried Newsburst, but it might be worth a look. It’s advertised as a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more.
RSS-to-IM services such as that of immedi.at provide a means to get new news delivered to the instant messenger of your choice.
Matt Haughey writes about server side feed reader and publisher reBlog. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to install and use reBlog on your own PHP/MySQL server, along with a video demo of how he uses reBlog as his own reader. You’ll need a web server with PHP and access to your own MySQL database to install reBlog. reBlog is different from other online readers as you store and keep your own data. You don’t depend on someone else’s server being up or down. Tip: add a robots.txt file to tell search engines to stay out of the “public” reBlog directory and possibly add authentication to the output file.
Here’s a cool tip for those who want to view a password protected gmail feed in Bloglines:
https://gmail_username%40gmail.com:password@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom