How much of your time is spent navigating to the websites you read on a daily and/or weekly basis and how do you go about doing that? Are you aware that you can save yourself time by quickly and easily subscribing to all of your favourite websites and have them within one spot?
There are two main ways of subscribing to a website: RSS and email
RSS Subscriptions:
RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” (something I learned today) or “Really Simple Syndication” (which is what I have always known it defined as). RSS is an XML-based web document that allows services to aggregate one or more RSS feeds into one place.
Have you ever wondered what all these buttons you see on websites are for:
They are for subscribing to RSS feeds!
Here is a great YouTube video that explains RSS and how to subscribe to an RSS feed:
A few years ago, I learned how a simple change to my Google Reader setting would allow me to “read” several blogs and/or websites simply by clicking on the “List View” icon:
and being able to easily scroll through and decide which of the posts I want to read:
by then clicking on the bolded (which indicates “unread”) post title. This expands the post for me to read from within the RSS Reader. I can then scroll down to see more of the unread posts and click to read if I chose to do so. When I am done skimming through them, I can click on the “Mark all as read” to unbold all of the items I was not interested in reading.
Another trick I learned, was to categorize so I can skim through by category and then do a “Mark all as read” just for the category I am reading. I do this simply by clicking on the category name:
This is also true if I want to click on one of the individual blogs/websites themselves. Bold indicates there are posts that are not read and the number beside them is the number of unread posts for a given category and/or blog/website.
Email Subscriptions:
Email subscriptions deliver content to your email inbox as it is published.
Subscribing by email (provided you can from the website) is quick and easy as well. On my website, you would scroll to where the subscription box is:
and simply enter your email and click on the “Subscribe” button.
Hopefully this has provided you with a tool to more easily keep on top of your favourite blogs and websites and subsequently, save you time!
