Want more Bliss. Success. Love?

It’s easy; just enter your email address into that form next to the big shiny symbol to your right. You’ll get my latest article in your emails, the day I publish them on UrbanMonk.Net. Don’t worry, I won’t spam you. And it’s free.

For those of you who want to know what that symbol is, it is now the universal symbol for RSS – Really Simple Syndication.

Which is a bit of a misnomer, because it took me ages to figure out what it was.

RSS intro

First off, some terminology for you. The articles that I publish on Urban Monk.Net also goes into the Urban Monk RSS feed. It “feeds” you my articles, so to speak. This is the opposite of the old way of using websites – it comes to you, instead of you going to a website to get the latest content.

Now, how does it know that you want my articles? You subscribe to my feed – and you get my articles delivered to you via email or your RSS reader.

RSS saves you time by not having to visit each site you want to read individually, hoping that they’ve updated since the last time you were there. For me, it’s a compliment. Someone likes my material enough to want more. Subscriber counts are also a good way of seeing how well I am doing in general.

How you use RSS

Now, RSS used to be very complex. Other sites will have different links; some call it Atom RSS, or so on – which makes it very hard to read and understand. Sometimes the subscribe link takes you to pages of code and pointy brackets. Very troublesome. But now I use a service called Feedburner, which really does make things simple.

Clicking on the big RSS button brings you to a separate page, with a little box on the right. (I also have little text links like “Subscribe to my feed” scattered around the site – they bring you to the same page.)

In that page, the box on the top right contains little buttons that take you to the most popular RSS web based readers. These are websites that keep a note of what feeds you are subscribed to.

When you click on these buttons, you will be prompted to sign up for an account if you don’t have one (at that website, not mine), and then all your RSS feed can then be accessible whenever you log in to that website.

Essentially you log in to one website to read all the different websites you have subscribed to. Some of the buttons refer to software that you can use from your computer.

I personally use the Google personalised homepage as I only subscribe to 4 or 5 feeds. It’s free, good looking, and easy to use. If you subscribe to more feeds, try using Bloglines. I’ve heard great things about it, and it’s free at the time of writing. Other services might require a fee.

Well, that’s all you need to know to get started, so subscribe now!

If you want more information, check out the Feed 101 page from Feedburner.