Long-time reader and Top Commenter, Hellohahanarf, asked the following questions the other day, “what does subscribing to your site do? will it alert me when you post a new piece? will it make me a part of the cool kids so i don’t have to eat my baloney sammich alone (wait, what the hell was it you said you ate by yourself?!?!)”
You’ve probably noticed a message that pops up the first 5 or so times you visit my site inviting you to Subscribe to my site. You’ve probably also noticed a spot in the sidebar where you can “Subscribe via Email.” And again, in the footer of my page, my mascot once again asks you to sign up.
“Great, yeah, we see, it, what the hell does it MEAN?” you ask…
It’s pretty simple really. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. To put it in basic terms, it’s a way to take all the content from my site and publish it somewhere else.
“Ok, but what’s good about that?” Man you have a lot of questions!
Do you read several websites daily? How do you read them? You have a bookmark page that you click on and wait for the page to load? You keep a mental list of the sites and type them in the address bar? That’s not so hard to do if you only follow one or two sites every day. But what if you want to read 10?
Do you ever type in the site, waiting to see a new post from your favorite blogger (me, right?) only to discover that he hasn’t written anything today? Bummer, huh?
Well, there’s a much easier way to keep up with all your favorite sites: use a feed reader.
There are many different feed readers out there, some are available as software that you run on your computer, others are web-based (much more convenient in my opinion). I use one of the most popular, Google Reader.
I read about 100 different sites everyday. It’s all made so much easier by taking advantage of RSS. I don’t spend all day checking to see if there are new posts. If the post shows up on Google Reader, I read it. No post = no appearance in my reader. When I read something that I want to comment on, I simply click on the link in the feed and it takes me right to the correct spot. No fuss.
If you don’t want to use a reader, most sites offer email subscriptions. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Once a day you’ll get an email from me that contains all of the posts I’ve written that day. A little bit of JesterTunes gracing your inbox.
So yeah, subscribe and you won’t be stuck eating peanut butter sandwiches by yourself.
