Using an Aggregator
Aggregators, news or feed readers are a class of tools that help manage the content from sites such as blogs. It can be time consuming going to individuals blogs or other related websites to check if they have been updated. To get around this it is possible to subscribe to the content from particular sites. It’s a bit like subscribing to a newspaper - instead of having to go to the newsagent everyday to get the paper, the paper is delivered to you personally.
Most modern browsers offer the facility to subscribe to content via what are know as RSS Feeds. Pages which have the facility to subscribe to content generally have the RSS Feed icon shown below:
On the bottom left of this page you can see two feeds you can subscribe to for this site. One is content published on the site by me. The second one is to subscribe to content made up of the comments provided by others. If you have a RSS enabled browser you might like to subscribe to both of these feeds by clicking on the appropriate icon.
There are external sites that will also manage your feeds for you. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to be on your personal machine to get access. Anywhere you have an Internet connection you can have access to your subscribed feeds. The downside is that you generally have to register to be part of these sites which means you often have to provide some identifying information.
One such site is Bloglines which can be located at:
Have a look around and register if you want to. It’s not necessary for success in this unit. However I would encourage you to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feeds through your browser so you can experience how the process works.