Friday, 2 March 2012

Add RSS Feeds to the Windows 7 Sidebar

What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS?  Benefits and Reasons for using RSS....

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds and want quick access to them on your Windows 7 desktop, you can add a Feed Reader gadget to the desktop to do this.

First let’s bring the gadget to the visible desktop.  To do this Right-Click any open space on the Desktop.  Then Click Gadgets.
windows 7 feed reader gadgets context menu access
The Gadgets window will appear, Right-Click Feed Headlines and then Click Add.
how to add a feed reader gadget in windows 7

Subscribe to an RSS Feed

The first step is to subscribe to an RSS feed in Internet Explorer. The RSS button in Internet Explorer is grey unless you are on a site for which an RSS feed is available. Then, the button turns orange.
Open Internet Explorer and go to the site to which you want to subscribe. Click the orange RSS button on the toolbar.
RSS button in IE
The RSS feed displays in the browser window. Click the Subscribe to this feed link in the yellow box.
Subscribe to this feed link
The Subscribe to this Feed dialog box. You can change the name of the feed and also specify which folder in which to save the feed. This allows you to organize your feeds, if you have a lot of them. Click the Subscribe button.
Subscribe to this Feed dialog box
A message displays saying you have been successfully subscribed to the feed. A link is provided allowing you access to your list of feeds. Click the View my feeds link.
View my feeds link
A sidebar displays with the Feeds tab active, displaying a list of the feeds to which you are subscribed.
Viewing feeds in IE
 Done....

 There are many major weblog software packages contain RSS generators which are fairly easy to use, too.

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