How To Go Green

New content is published on How To Go Green almost daily. You can view this content by visiting the home page at http://www.howtogogreen.com on a regular basis. However, you may want to visit lots of different sites that also update their content regularly. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to keep trawling all your favourite sites to see if they've added more content. This is where Really Simple Syndication comes in.

As well as printing out content on the World Wide Web, How To Go Green also publishes its content as an RSS feed. The RSS feed is an XML file containing all the content of the front page. You can see a nicely formatted version of the file here. To see it in all its unadulterated XML glory, view the page source.

There are a number of ways in which this XML file can be used, for example you can subscribe to an RSS feed as a live bookmark in your browser. Alternatively, you can use a feed reader to manage all of your RSS subscriptions.

A feed reader is a tool that lets you subscribe to a number of different RSS feeds and view them all from the same window.

These tools may be of the stand-alone type such as FeedReader and FeedDemon or you can add a plugin to your exisiting software such as Newsgator for Outlook and Sage for Firefox.

Emails clients like Thunderbird already have support for RSS feed management built in. If you're a Yahoo! user, you can even syndicate feeds into My Yahoo!

To subscribe to an RSS feed using browsers like Firefox and Safari click on the RSS icon (in the bottom right hand corner of Firefox and in the location bar of Safari). You'll be asked if you want to subscribe to the feed. If so, add How To Go Green to your list of bookmarks.

To subscribe to How To Go Green using a feed reader you'll need the location of the feed:
http://www.howtogogreen.com/atom.xml
Full instructions on how to use the feed will be available from the Help files of your feed reader.

In My Yahoo!, click on Choose Content and select RSS Headlines from the list of wide modules. Search for the RSS feed URL:
http://www.howtogogreen.com/atom.xml
If Yahoo finds the feed, Add it to your My Yahoo! front page.

There are plenty of sites out there that can tell you more about RSS than I can. Try this introduction at CNET. If you're after something a bit more techy try this site from the O'Reilly Network.