Subscribing to a Site Feed in Internet Explorer

Browsers have always allowed you to bookmark your favorite web sites. Now browsers like Internet Explorer 7 allow you to save a site feed in your favorites menu so that you can quickly go to the newest content of the sites that you care most about.

A quick definition -

A site feed is a text file that allows a webmaster to share new content with an audience. Site feeds can take many formats including xml, rdf, atom, and rss. Site feeds are often referred to as a newsfeed, feed, blog feed, rss or atom. No matter the format or the name they all do the same thing allow you to get web-based content without having to visit a site.

Subscribing to a Feed

Internet Explorer 7 identifies a page with an active site feed with the universal orange site feed icon.

Click on the feed icon to view the site feeds available for subscription. The content of the feed will display so you can preview the information before completing your subscription.

Click on the Subscribe to this feed link to add it as a favorite in your browser.

This confirmation window will open and you can decide where you want to save this feed. It is recommended that you use the default options.

Click the Subscribe button.

When you want to check see if new content is available on this site just check the Feeds section of your Favorites if the favorite title is bold, then you have new content. If you hover over the link you will get information on the number of new messages and when the last update was made. Click on the favorite to read the new new content.

A page similar to this will load that has excerpts of the most recent content with links to read the full story.

You can subscribe to multiple feeds in this method and most sites integrate feeds as an option to keep readers aware of new content.

There are many sites at Allegheny that use rss feeds learn more about them online at http://www.allegheny.edu/news/feeds.php.

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