PUBLICATION CENTER

An RSS Feed is one of those mysterious, surprisingly powerful little tools that suddenly start showing up as an icon on a lot of different websites without much explanation. The RSS part stands for Real Simple Syndication. That’s a succinct way of saying that you can easily have information sent to you from multiple online sources for easy skimming right on your desktop. You don’t need to repeatedly visit dozens of different websites to keep up with new content. Nor, do you need an editor to choose which news items and articles should be made available for you to read in a magazine or newsletter.

When you subscribe to a variety of RSS Feeds, you are in effect editing your own magazine by choosing those sources, press releases, and experts you regard as most relevant, interesting and credible. When you find an information source you like (whether it’s the New York Times, MSNBC, Fox News, Studio LexJet, the website of a local TV station, or your cousin Joe’s blog), the RSS feed will automatically send you headlines and summaries as new posts are published to your selected sites.

Subscribe to a news site, and you’ll get updates all day long. Set up an RSS feed for Studio LexJet and you’ll get updates twice a week. The URL of the blog is http://blog.lexjet.com

RSS feeds aren’t just for blogs. On Canon’s site, you can subscribe to press releases, product news, or information from the Canon Digital Learning Center. On HP’s site, you can set up an RSS feed to receive press releases or announcements of educational podcasts and videocasts (vodcasts). Anytime you see the RSS symbol on a blog or website, it means that you can “subscribe” via an RSS feed.

When RSS feeds were first introduced, special feed-reader software was required. Feed-reader software is still readily available for free downloading or website access.

Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 now have built-in RSS feed readers.

Internet Explorer 7: To subscribe through Explorer, look for an orange RSS symbol to appear on the browser bar. This means that an RSS feed has been detected on the site you’re viewing. Simply click on the RSS Feed button in the browser bar, and you’ll be asked if you want to subscribe to this feed. If you want to filter out certain topic categories, you can do so.  When you subscribe to an RSS Feed through Explorer, the RSS Feeds will appear alongside your Favorites list. Or, you can set up a gadget to display headlines from your feeds in a small window on your desktop.

Outlook 2007: If you subscribe to RSS Feeds through Outlook, you’ll view the feeds through a folder in your Inbox. To add an RSS feed through Outlook, click on Account Settings through the Tools menu. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New. Paste the URL of the RSS Feed you want to subscribe to, and click Add. Click OK.  (To subscribe to Studio LexJet, use the URL: http://blog.lexjet.com/)

Yahoo or Google: If you are signed up with either Yahoo! or Google, you can have RSS Feeds sent through your My Yahoo! or Google Reader page.  Simply click on the Add a Subscription icon, and insert the url of the Studio LexJet blog (http://blog.lexjet.com/).  The headlines from your selected RSS feeds will appear much as they would on a typical news site.  Google Reader will even recommend feeds that you might be interested in based on your current feeds and online searches. The Google recommendations show how many subscribers a particular blog has and how often that blog is typically updated.

AOL: On AOL.com, you’ll see a Feed Me page with some popular sites categorized by topic (sports, news, finance, entertainment).  You can easily add new categories (e.g. Photography) as well as all of the photo-related blogs you’d like to follow through RSS feeds.

A complete list of the all of the different stand-alone, web-based, and e-mail software that can aggregate your RSS Feeds for easy viewing can be found on Wikipedia.

Subscribe to Studio LexJet: Next to the RSS icon on the Studio LexJet blog, you can choose to subscribe either to the posts and/or the published comments. We think a subscription to Studio LexJet will add a nice photography-business touch to your incoming stream of world, national, local, sports, financial, and entertainment news. The URL for Studio LexJet is: http://blog.lexjet.com/