How-to: Blog & RSS Feed Update

It's been a year since our first "official" post introducing the Law Library Letter. Looking back on the How-to on blogs and RSS, I decided an update was in order. It's obvious that the technology gods have ignored our pleas for slower change.

The concept of blogs has not changed much from a year ago. For a short reminder, a blog (shortened from weblog or web log) is a web site in which entries are posted and displayed in reverse chronological order. While many blogs have been created as online diaries or journals, there are also now millions of blogs provided in order to bring attention to updated information or to allow groups of people to discuss topics of common interest.

What has changed are the options for subscribing to RSS feeds, whether they are for a specific web site, blog, wiki, image service (the list goes on...). RSS, as I described in the one-year old post,

"stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. But unless you are a major techie, this means nothing. A more useful explanation is that through this technology, you can track a wide variety of online information, from Dilbert, to the very popular Wyoming State Law Library blog, to CNN. And you can do this without wading through relentless email messages or trying to remember to frequently check your favorite web sites. The information comes in as linked headlines accompanied by brief summaries or the first few lines of the information."

In addition to subscribing to a feed using an aggregator like Bloglines, you can now use your browser to view & track feeds. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, subscribing to RSS feeds is as simple as clicking a button in the browser. (You might be able to use more than these browsers, but I am limiting to these as two of the most popular as well as the browsers with which I have experience.)

Firefox adds an orange RSS icon to in the address bar to indicate if a site has an RSS feed associated with it. Make sure you set the feed options (Tools>Options>Feeds) for Live Bookmarks, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc. Then you can click on that icon to subscribe to whatever feed shows up in the Firefox address bar.

To learn more about the IE7 RSS subscription option, check out the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.