Subscribing.

Today, I don't have a photo for you, I just want to emphasize the power of RSS.

For those of you who do not use RSS and may be confused about what it is, or what it does, here is a short tutorial.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication".  That pretty much sums it up.  When you subscribe to an RSS feed, like mine, you no longer have to check the site you subscribe to every day to see if something new has been posted.  Instead, you just fire up your RSS reader, and right there in front of you are all the updates to the web page you have subscribed to.

So imagine you have subscribed to 3 different web pages.  Lets say the CBC or CJOB website is one of them,  Event Horizons Photography is one of them, and the Daily Recipe Blog (I just made that up, but there are such blogs, I am sure of it.) is one of them.

Lets say you check your e-mail while you have your morning coffee.  I'm suggesting you check your RSS reader at the same time.  With the click of your reader, you get all your blog updates (usually just the titles or a small snippet) displayed on the same page.  If you like something you see, you can click it and it will bring you to the full page, and you can get the full story.

On a typical day I would get 10 stories from the CBC and CJOB, one recipe from the "Daily Recipe" and a one in 20 chance of a post from Event Horizons Photography.  (I have to apologize for my posting infrequency, but I post whenever I get a chance!)

Most web pages worth your time these days have RSS subscriptions.  If it doesn't have one, it probably doesn't get updated very often, in which case a simple bookmark is sufficient.  But if you only bookmark a web page, that means you manually have to click all your favourite web page bookmarks one by one, and CHECK if it has been updated.  Boring and tedious.

Now with RSS, you just check one page (your RSS reader page) and you won't miss any changes to any of your pages.  If nothing has changed on Event Horizons Photography since the last time you checked your reader, then it won't even show up on your reading list!

RSS does two things:

Saves you time.

Keeps you coming back when I update my blog.

SO!  Subscribe today!


 Subscribe in a reader

To subscribe to ANY web page that is capable of it, just find the little orange square like the one above, and click it.  That will start you on the road to syndication goodness!  I hardly ever watch TV, or read the paper anymore, because using this technique, all my favourite information like news, entertainment, arts, buy and sell, job search, etc is ready right on my RSS reader front page.  (I use Google Reader because I already have a Google account, and it is quite handy).  Many other readers are out there, and you just have to find the one that suits you.  When you click the orange square, many of the good ones will be suggested to you.

Ok, thanks for reading AND SUBSCRIBING!  I hope to have more photos posted soon!