How to Subscribe to a News Feed

Subscribing to news feeds helps you stay up-to-date with new content written for web sites. When you subscribe to one of Conversio Virium’s news feeds, you get automatically notified whenever one of our contributors adds or updates a web page on our web site. In other words, subscribing to news feeds makes updates come to you instead of forcing you to come back here in order to check for new updates. Here’s how it works.

What is a news feed?

Every time one of us updates the Conversio Virium web site, we make changes to several pages. One of these pages is the news feed page. The news feed page is just like every other page except that instead of showing only a part of the content on our web site, it shows a list of all the recent updates we’ve made to the site together on that single page.

How can I use your news feed to get notified of updates?

Even though news feeds are just like regular web pages, they are meant to be accessed by special software programs called news readers or feed readers. If you access a news feed from your regular web browser, it doesn’t always work. So the first step to using news feeds is obtaining a feed reader that you like.

Choose a News Reader

There are several different kinds of news readers. Most of them are either desktop news readers or web-based news readers. If you choose a desktop news reader you’ll probably have to install it. If you choose a web-based feed reader you’ll probably have to create an account to start using it. Here are some news readers we’ve used ourselves and have heard good things about from others:

Add the News Feed to the News Feed Reader

Once you’ve chosen a news reader you like, the next step is to add Conversio Virium’s news feed page to the news feed reader so it can go and fetch updates. The process is basically the same as bookmarking a regular web page.

If the news reader you chose knows how to handle the feed: URL handler (or if it’s smart enough to recognize a news feed when it sees one), simply go to Conversio Virium’s list of news feeds and click on the little news feed icon (Subscribe to this feed.) next to the one(s) you want to add to your news reader. (This process of adding feeds to a feed reader is called subscribing.) Clicking that link will open the news feed in your news feed reader, giving you the option of adding that feed to your list of subscriptions.

If your news reader doesn’t recognize the feed: URL handler, you’ll have to add the news feed of your choice manually. Each feed reader does this in a slightly different way, though all of them offer help if you get stuck. Again, the process is reminiscent of bookmarking the news feed page. In general, you copy the news feed page’s URL (or web address) and paste it into the subscription box of the news reader.

You find the news feed page’s URL by clicking on the name of the feed on our news feed listing page, which will take you to the news feed page, and then looking at your web browser’s address or location bar (which might look something like http://conversiovirium.org/feed/). It is this address that you need to copy into your news reader.

Now that I have your news feed, when will I be notified of updates?

Your news reader will automatically notify you of any updates to your subscriptions when you look at it. (That is, if there are any updates to view, of course.)

The advantage of using a news reader really shows when you want to check more than one site for updates. Without a news reader, you would have to visit each site and search through it for content you have not already seen to find updates. With a news reader, you can simply open your news reader and it will tell you about all the changes on all the sites you have subscribed to.

If you would like to learn more about how Conversio Virium’s web site works, please read our technical colophon.

The opinions and views expressed on this web site are the beliefs of the Conversio Virium club member who wrote them and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members or affiliated organizations.

Unless otherwise noted, all original content on this site is protected under an Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 3.0 Unported license and is hereby copyright © 2007–2009 by Conversio Virium and its contributors.

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