Laura’s Winning Ideas

Readers of this blog are likely to be busy and if you are on this page, hesitant to click on a subscribe button that might take you down a rabbit hole that is deep and long.

Me too.

I got help from a fellow blogger who explained this RSS, Atom, feedburner stuff simply enough for me to understand and get comfortable. Plus, I got it set up on the first try!

A) You will need a place to receive your messages. Choose one:

1. On this blog, you can subscribe by email and then create a folder for the messages so you can read them whenever you are ready.

2. However, you might like to receive updates from this blog, along with a variety of other updates from sites such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ESPN, Yahoo, Forbes, etc. If so, an aggregator works like a custom web page to collect all the latest posts from sites you select.

That can be a nice thing to have when you take a mid-morning break for coffee. Instead of reading the local paper, your aggregator can give you all the latest news you want to see.

There are many aggregators. Some of them stink. Others I haven’t tried. I’m going to recommend one that is easy to use: Great News Download the software (it’s free) and follow the instructions to open it.

B) Now you subscribe to receive new messages. Choose one:

1. By e-mail: Click on Subscribe – Email, put your e-mail address in the subscription box. You’ll be asked to confirm you are the subscriber, and then you are ready to go. If you don’t get an email message right away confirming your subscription, try again.

2. By aggregator: Return to the blog homepage and click on the RSS feed link (on other sites, it may be a button that says RSS or Feed or XML) then copy the shortcut (Right click, copy shortcut on Windows machines. Control-click and hold mouse button down to copy link on Apple machines.)

Open your aggregator (GreatNews) and paste into the address window at the top, press enter,go, or select and you’ll see the latest posts from the blog. Some aggregators will ask you to select subscribe. Others will volunteer a folder into which this feed will be kept.

From this blog, here is the RSS feed address you will see when you paste into the aggregator address window: http://feeds.feedburner.com/1ricci/BznU

Why Bother?

These instructions came from Mike Sansome, a blogger with more expertise than I, who consults with companies adapting to Web 2.0 (of which this blogging technology is one part).

He told me this story:

I have one investor I work with closely. He is not a blogger, and it took awhile before his feed reading muscles got used to the exercise of using an aggregator. Last week, he shared with me that his constituents saved “a ton of money” because of information gathered through the feeds we set up from searches and news.

That said, allow me to encourage you to continue honing your muscles. In some ways, reading feeds is like many other exercises. The muscles may sting at first, but the benefits of building those muscles save time and in some instances, serious money. Push-ups anyone?