What Are Social Book Marks and RSS Feeds?
How To Use Social Book Marking Buttons
When you read something you like, it’s natural to want to share this with your friends. You can do this easily by clicking on the buttons you see at the bottom of each article or web page here on CampTaiChi.com.
If you don’t have an account with that social marking site, you can quickly create one by filling in the short form, or by clicking on the “create an account” button and filling in the short form. Here are some hints.
- Fill in all the information that’s requested, including your correct birthday if they ask for it. This is one way some sites use to verify it’s you if you have a problem with your account later. If you enter a wrong date, it could make it hard for the help desk to help you, and you can usually hide this information if you don’t want others to see it.
- Enter a good email address. If you receive email from this site and don’t want to you can usually ask them not to send you emails and you can always opt out. Nowadays good companies don’t sell email addresses and will honor your request not to here from them again. These companies are worth millions of dollars, and believe me, they don’t want to upset the people using their sites.
- You will usually be asked to enter a code that is displayed in an odd way on the screen. This is to be sure you are truly a human and not a machine. Can you believe there are people who would actually try to promote themselves using robots? tisk, tisk
- Hit enter.
- You have now shared the page you were viewing with thousands of other people and you can now share your information on that site with friends. This way you don’t have to email them. All they do is go to that site and look at your profile to see everything you think is interesting. Pretty cool huh? Your friends can even set up an RSS feed to be notified every time you add a new page to your favorites. (RSS feeds are discussed below.)
- As a site owner, I like this a lot. It not only shows me you like what I have shared with you, but helps me get the word out to lots of other people just like you!
How To Use RSS
RSS stands for really simple syndication and it’s a way for you to automatically get the information you’re interested in all in one place, for FREE. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of FREE web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular FREE web-based feed readers.
I use Google Reader and it’s a snap. Here’s how to make Google Reader work.
1. Click here to go to Google Reader and click on the “create an account” button if you don’t already have a Google Account. All you need is an email address and it’s basically the same as creating a social book marking account.
2. Once you have an account you can just click on the RSS feed button on any site you’re on to add it to your account. You may also need to choose your particular RSS reader (Google Reader) from a popup window so the site knows where you want the information sent.
3. If there is no RSS feed button, just copy the full address from the address bar of your web browser, go to your personal Google Reader page, click on the “Add Subscription” button on the left side of the Google Reader page, paste that information in the popup box that Google Reader gives you, and click on the “Subscribe Now” Button.
4. That’s it. Now you can go to one single web page, Google Reader, to see what’s new on the sites you like. When you click on the title for the listing you’re interested in, Google takes you directly to that web page so you can take a look. Isn’t that cool?
So now, at the click of a button, you’re up to date on everything you find interesting. Just sit back and enjoy.
