Use Internet Explorer to Subscribe to and manage RSS Feeds

Use Internet Explorer to Subscribe to and manage RSS Feeds
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What is RSS?

If you visit the same web sites regularly, you know you have to scan through the articles and headlines you’ve already seen to find what’s new. This equates to time lost in a work environment. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to visit those sites and only see what’s been added or changed since you last visited? You can, if the web site offers an RSS feed (and you subscribe to it).

RSS is the technology that lets you do this. RSS can help you more easily stay up to date on the latest information, articles, technical content, news, and more, without having to read through previously viewed material on a web site. RSS feeds will find and list the articles and other items on a web page that have been added since your last visit. This includes news and other Web-based content, and is being offered by more and more web sites each day. RSS content is offered to users in RSS format, and you can access that content using IE7.

How to Use RSS to Your Advantage

Here’s how you can use RSS to your advantage in a home office setting. Say you’re a realtor, and you visit a web site like www.realtor.com, every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Each time you visit the site you have to trudge through information you’ve already seen to access information you have yet to see, or, information that’s been added since your last visit. If the site offers an RSS feed (which www.realty.com does not, by the way), you can bypass all of this and only view what you haven’t seen before.

Get Started

To get started with RSS, you’ll need to find a web site (using Internet Explorer 7 or higher) that offers an RSS feed. Http://www.cnn.com does. You can tell if a site offers an RSS feed because the RSS icon on the Command Bar turns orange. [See Image 1] If it’s gray, no RSS feeds are available

To see how many RSS feeds are available, click the arrow next to the orange RSS icon. There are two feeds available from CNN.com: Top Stories and Recent Stories. [See Image 2] To subscribe to a feed, click it. From the next web page, click Subscribe to this feed link. [See Image 3]

You’ll manage your RSS feeds in Favorites window. And as with Favorites, you access your subscribed feeds through the Favorites Center.

Step-By-Step – Subscribe To A Feed

1. Browse to a web site that offers an RSS feed.

2. Click the down arrow beside the orange RSS icon.

3. Select the feed name.

4. Click Subscribe to this feed. [See Image 3]

5. Type a name for the feed.

6. Use the drop down list to select an existing folder in which to save the feed, or, select New Folder.

7. If you select New Folder, type a name for the folder and click Create.

8. Click Subscribe.

Step-By-Step – Manage Feeds

1. Click the yellow star icon to open the Favorites Center.

2. Click Feeds if it isn’t already selected.

3. View the feeds by expanding folder names if necessary. [See Image 4]

4. To view a feed, select it.

Images

Select a feed

Subscribe

Manage