Sliding Testimonials
Slide Left
Slide Right



RSS Feeds, Google Reader, FeedDemon and Multiple News Sources


December 15th, 2011
Feed DemonWeb Ventures Plus™ recommends FeedDemon
Image © FeedDemon

Discover RSS feeds and how using them will make your daily news reading more efficient. In the age of information overload, RSS feeds are a godsend. If you get your news from as many news outlets as possible, then you’ll find this article to be of great use. I’ve often found myself bookmarking multiple websites onto my bookmark bar in Google Chrome and attempting to visit them each day. I realized that even with all these great bookmarks I tend to only visit around five of the sites a day. It quickly becomes tedious and often overwhelming to attempt visiting every single news website each day. RSS feeds come to the rescue.

RSS Feeds

If you haven’t heard of RSS feeds before, then you are missing out on one of this past decades most important web browsing and development tools. RSS feeds are .XML files which store website content, e.g., blogs, articles and posts, into a universally readable format. You may view our RSS Feed as an example. Feeds make it easy for webmasters and web surfers alike to embed, syndicate and view website content without having to actually visit/embed actual websites.

RSS FeedsAn RSS Icon

Subscribing to a feed is quite easy. Simply look for the RSS icon or link to the feed on your favorite website. When you open the feed, it’ll give you the option to subscribe to the feed. Once subscribed you may use your favorite browser, email client (e.g., Outlook or Thunderbird), Google Reader or a locally downloaded application to read them.

Google Reader – we recommend using Google Reader to subscribe to all of your feeds. Google reader is free and will be important later in this article when we discuss reader synchronization. You may sign up for Google Reader here. There are many apps for android and the iPhone which make it easy to use Google Reader. Since Google Reader stores your feeds in their cloud, then you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by simply logging into your Google account.

Work News and Personal News

If you are like me, you’ll have a list of news sources you read related to your specific profession and then other news whether it be politics, entertainment, science, etc. Google Reader will allow you to categorize these into different folders. So each day you can quickly skim through your folders depending on what news you want to read that day.

FeedDemon

While Google Reader is great and it comes with powerful reading tools, there is just something about having a local application on your computer that is unmatched by the storm of cloud based applications coming our way. FeedDemon offers a free version of it’s program which allows you to synchronize your feeds to Google Reader, so you may install FeedDemon on your work desktop and personal laptop, while keeping them synchronized through Google Reader.

FeedDemon makes it very easy to view your feeds, subscribe to new feeds, find new feeds and keep track of your unread and starred (i.e., items you bookmark for future access) articles. It’s like having your very own Future Digital Newsstand right on your PC. The reason I find it so useful is because it’s more user friendly than Google Reader and it is more formal than visiting a website/web-based application. Additionally, it offers an excellent tool for those of us subscribed to many feeds: the Panic button! The panic button is a shortcut to mark all of your articles older than a specified time frame as read. This removes them from your newsstand, helping to keep you from becoming overwhelmed by thousands of potential unread articles. The Panic button is just one of their many great features. Visit feeddemon.com to download the program and learn more about it’s benefits over traditional RSS readers.

At Web Ventures Plus™ we setup RSS feeds and blogs for clients all the time. If you need help setting up your own feed and/or help with any of the above, please use our contact form to request assistance.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster