RSS Feed Set-up Guide

What is an RSS Feed?

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feed lets you subscribe to a website or blog so that you will automatically receive the latest post from that site in your email program.

What’s the problem with setting up RSS Feeds?

In theory, you should be able to click on the orange RSS Feed link (at the bottom of every post on this site), and follow the instructions to link your email to this site’s feed. Unfortunately, what should be seamless isn’t always.

That’s because there are a diverse array of internet browsers and email programs in the high-tech world of cyberspace, and different programs have different protocols as well as different security filters. In addition, your anti-virus program, and even your computer software, may be set up with certain filtering standards that complicate what should be an easy process.

And if you are like me – marginally knowledgeable and barely competent at the technology side of the internet – you get easily lost or frustrated. (I’m lucky to have a brother who both knows more than I do, and who is willing to go find out what he doesn’t know. Without him, this site would not exist.)

You could first try clicking on the orange RSS Feed link and follow directions, to see if that works. However, you might get a page filled with gobbledy-gook when you click on that link. If you do – or if you’d like to avoid that route altogether – let me try to help by suggesting the easiest way to get around most complications to establish an RSS Feed.

The Easy RSS

First, you have to know that each email program is a bit different. The procedure I’m going to lay out has been tried on Yahoo! and Gmail. It should work in a similar way on other email programs. But I don’t know if it works on AOL. Once I find a way to check that out, I’ll indicate that in this message (AOL is a category of its own, and at times problematic.)

Here’s what you do:

1) go to the email program’s Home page. (On Yahoo, that’s the “MyYahoo” page, NOT the “Yahoo!Mail” page. If, like me, you usually reside on the YahooMail page, you have to click on the small MyYahoo link at the top right, next to the search window.)

2) locate the “Feeds” or “Reader” link. (It’s “My RSS Feeds” in Yahoo, “Reader” in Gmail. It might have a variant name in your MSN or AOL or other program.)

3) click on the link to open it. You will see a button or window to “add.” (Yahoo reads “add content.” Gmail reads “add subscription.”) In Yahoo, you then have to click on the “add RSS Feed” button toward the bottom of the new window pane.

4) in the box that opens, type in: http://www.churchchange.org/feed. Click the accept button (however it’s labelled.)

That should do it!

If you have trouble, please feel invited to drop me an email, and tell me what email program you use. I’ll see if I can help you through the process. My email: tbascom@churchchange.org.

By the way…

As a rule, any time you want to add an RSS Feed from a website or blog, what you do is type in: URL/feed. “URL” is the address of the website. For example, for my blog the URL is http://www.churchchange.org. So the feed is simply: http://www.churchchange.org/feed.

Now you can follow all of your favorite sites!

Aww, shucks. You’re welcome. Don’t mention it…

–T