What Is RSS and how do I access mine at Apsense?

Posted by Thea Westra
1853 Pageviews

When you go to your profile page at Apsense i.e. http://www.apsense.com/user/forwardsteps and then scroll down and look to the right hand side (under the Google ads), you'll see a box titled Subscription. Inside that box is an orange button that is titled RSS.

When you click that organge button, the link is http://www.apsense.com/feed/blog.xml?id=forwardsteps
That is your feed for your Apsense blogs.

Any similar orange button, on anyone's site or page, is their feed link. It is now a universally recognized icon for feeds. Though not everyone uses it for their feed link. Sometimes they use their own version, or simply a text link.
At my Forward Steps blogs I use http://www.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker1.php and the Add This service. I've also lately begun to use http://coach-resources.blogspot.com/2007/11/feedm8.html

Feed links are only used for sites that are updated or changed regularly, such as a blog.
A relatively static page such as my http://www.forwardsteps.com.au would not have a feed. It'd serve no real purpose to have one there.

Your ABC page e.g. http://forwardsteps.apsense.com has a feed of its own, see it at very bottom of its page. The feed link for that ABC page is http://www.apsense.com/feed/abc.xml?id=forwardsteps
See how it shows different items than the other feed page?

Visitors could subscribe to your blogs, your ABC and even your Groups at Apsense e.g. http://www.apsense.com/group/100082 has a feed link on its "Description" page, again using the orange button just under the Google ads.
The link for that one is   http://www.apsense.com/feed/group.xml?id=100082

Now, looking at it from the other side of the fence i.e. as a subscriber rather than author.

If you ever wanted to subscribe to someone else's feed because you want to stay updated then you'd open an account with Bloglines, Feedburner, Yahoo or Google, for example.
They have feed reading facilities. You can collect as many feeds from others as you'd like to stay up to date with.

Bloglines, Google, Yahoo, Feedburner and many others, offer a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and news feeds. You can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and they will monitor updates to those sites.
You can then read the latest entries easily within their listed feed, after logging in to your account with them.

You can ask for a weekly or daily email to let you know which subscriptions of yours have been updated so you can then go and read them all in the one location.
It saves getting hundreds of emails when you subscribe to each one individually using an email service. Instead, you log into your Feedburner, Bloglines, Yahoo or Google reader and see all of them located in one place and you can select which ones you'd like to read.

To find out yet more, you might like this simple site that explains more about RSS. Or simply Google the term RSS.