Making the web work for you

Our lives are often enslaved by time – busyness rules… so how do we find the time to keep up-to-date with everything. The internet for one can capture you and swallow hours without you even noticing it, or the thought of wasting time surfing puts you off looking in the first place.

You may already be aware, but just in case you are not, help is at hand… it is basically this little orange button , also known as RSS or Atom feeds. This is a ’site feed’ that you can subscribe to. For example, our blog offers you the chance to subscribe to the site feed by email (but most sites don’t) or through using a News Reader or Aggregator. Once you subscribe to the feed, when the site gets updated it automatically sends the update to you – releasing you from having to go to each website that interests you for the latest update.

There are two types of News Reader – online readers (easier to set-up) and desktop based readers – and most of them are free. I use an online reader from Google – called Google Reader – so whatever computer I am on I can access it, but Yahoo! and Bloglines offer two of the many alternatives. There are also lots of desktop based readers – most web browsers have them inbuilt now, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser – but other programmes have them inbuilt too, including the Mozilla Thunderbird email programme. For lists of alternatives try here or here.

Assuming you’ve selected your reader – then next time you are on a website you like, look for the orange box (it usually appears automatically in the top toolbar of your browser) or a ’subscribe to the feed’ link – then just click on it and add the feed to your reader. It may just liberate you from the frenzy of surfing – and help you stay up-to-date with whatever it is that rocks your boat.