One of the upsides (and there are very few) of using social media is the ability to communicate to your friends, family, etc with simple quicks posts that show up in their newsfeeds. They only have to open their feed of choice and there you are. Or at least that is the theory. We’ve all been surprised to miss something because FB decided to not show you an update. It’s not reliable and it can be frustrating.
In that vein I thought I’d explain how the old blog/rss feature works. It’s been around for years and it’s how we use to keep up to date with the posts that our friends posted who were using blogs to communicate. Much like I’m doing now.
Every blog has a ‘feed’. It’s a text only page that RSS readers read and pull posts from. These posts are then compiled and displayed in the RSS reader to make viewing easier. No need to actually have to visit the blog individually, let the reader bring them to you.
My favorite reader right now is Feedly. It’s simple to setup and use and the interface makes reading the posts easy. Adding feeds is easy and Feedly can usually intelligently find the correct URL to the feed, is is most likely to be something like blogname.com/feed.
There are lots of free RSS readers on the market, feel free to find one that works for you and follow your favorite people. With social media use on the decline, it may be the only way to stay in touch.