Practical RSS: Keeping Current - RSS And News - Episode 2
This is the second episode in the series "Practical RSS". In this episode, I cover Google's Feed Reader (and RSS!) to keep up with News events. I also demonstrate how you can create custom news feeds on any specific topic you want.
Step 2: News Outlets
From mainstream news outlets like CNN, the BBC or Reuters, to smaller local sources like the Sun or the Chicago Tribune, news feeds are everywhere on the Web. Whether you're interested in the latest global crisis or just the latest scores from your local sports teams there's probably an RSS feed there to keep you up to date. For the examples in this episode I'll be using Google Reader, a web-based RSS feed reader available for free from Google, to access it you'll need to have a G-mail account, but if you don't, no problem, it's easy to get.
Step 3: Gmail
To sign up go to www.google.com/accounts below the login fields on the right of the page click on the link: Create an Account Now, this will bring up a form that you need to fill out.
Step 4: Signing up for Gmail
Enter your e-mail address, then type in the password that you'd like to use with this account, you'll need to verify your password by entering it again. To prevent spammers from automatically creating new e-mail accounts, Google requires that you enter one of those word verification fields. When you're done with that just click on create my account.
Step 5: Confirming
Everything is now set up but there's still one more thing you'll need to do, Google will send out an e-mail to the address you entered during sign-up to make sure that it was valid, so go into your e-mail application and you should see a message there from Google, open it and click on the validation link inside, when you do a window should pop up letting you know that everything is set. With that done, you're ready to go, so lets grab a news feed and plug it in.
Step 6: Using Firefox
Because FireFox has built-in support for Google Reader, we'll use that as our browser here, open it up to your homepage then enter cnn.com, this will take you to the main CNN News page, scroll to the bottom of that page and click on the link for CNN's RSS feeds, you'll see a long list of feeds covering various topics like Sports, Politics, Law, and Technology, but for this example click on the feed for Top . FireFox will open it up and show you a set of options at the top for subscribing to it, pick Google Reader from the drop down menu and click subscribe now. You'll then see a pop-up from Google asking which service you want to use to subscribe to it, click on Google Reader, acknowledge the security warning, and you're done. The CNN news feed is now available inside Google Reader, you can easily browse the latest news headlines and click through to any stories you'd like to read.
Step 7: Adding Feeds
And if you'd like to have more news available you can follow these same basic steps that I showed for adding CNN and subscribe to feeds like Top News on Reuters.com or News front page on BBC.com. With feeds like these in your reader you'll have a good view of the biggest news stories of the day.
Step 8: Multiple Feeds
But what if you want to see news on something very specific, something not available in a pre-packaged feed, or even from a single web site? Let's say you want to track stories about Microsoft's new Vista operating system, but only stories that also mention either Apple's OS X or Linux, there is a way to do it. Go to google.com/news and in the search bar type in a query for news stories with the words "Vista" and either "OS X" or "Linux" this should return a nicely focused set of headlines to you.
Step 9: Custom Search
If you like these results and want to be notified when any new stories come out matching this search, Google news let's you subscribe to it, click on the text link "RSS" below the left menu and this search will open up as a regular RSS feed, make sure Google Reader is selected in the drop down menu at the top of the browser and click "Subscribe Now". This custom search is now available inside of Google Reader, whenever any news comes out on Vista matching your other criteria it'll end up there automatically, you'll never have to search for it again. When combined with more general news feeds, custom search feeds are a powerful way to keep current on more detail topics without losing track fo the big picture. You can add as many news feeds as you'd like to Google Reader and count on RSS to pull it all together.
We've covered a lot of ground in this show and I'm glad you took the time to watch. Be sure to join me next time on Practical RSS.
