How to gather info from the Internet

The Internet is full of interesting things that update all the time. But these updates come at different times. News sites update all through the day as people write articles, comics usually update once a day. Blogs can get updated anytime. So how do you know when & where to look?

You could keep a list of bookmarks on your browser, and every once in a while, when you remember, go searching through the list. "Anything new here?", "No",next..."Anything new here?", "No",next... until you find something. Hmm.. kind of like "are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet". Not very efficient.

A better way, sometimes, is to sign up to newsletters. But not everyone lets you do this, some places send updates weekly, some include stuff you have already seen.

If the page has a Twitter or Facebook you can link to those, and hope they update with each new story.

But my choice at the moment is RSS. Ever used it? But I'll bet you have seen this little icon. (it's just up there to the right!)

I had seen it for years and ignored it, working on the 'have you updated yet?' method. But eventually, I got tired of going the slow way (especially when I was checking lots of sites each day), and tried something it out.

There are lots of programs for RSS feeds, either installed on your machine(OSX, Windows, iOS, Android) or accessed on the web. I chose Google Reader because I use other Google products, and it lets me access from any computer I can get my hands on. I'll show you how to use this, but you could just as easily use Outlook, Safari, Windows Live mail or more).

First, go to Reader and sign in, or create an account if you need to.

Then, click on my 'Subscribe to posts' button up on the right. It will look like this once you click it:

Then, 'add to Google reader':

Done!

Pretty easy? Well... not so fast. This is the internet, designed and organized by many, many different people. So there are always a few different ways to do things. There is usually a 'subscribe' or 'RSS' or 'feeds' link on a site somewhere. If you're lucky, you look for the logo, click it, and add just like above. Sometimes, when you click you get a messy text page like this. When this happens, copy the URL (i.e. the http:// www bit), and  paste it in the 'add a subscription' box on Google Reader.

Sometimes, if you are really unlucky and find that the page doesn't have a feed, but that you really want it anyway, you'll have to resort to Google Search. You'll find that some people have put together feeds for all sorts of things. For example, I like the comic Sinfest. It doesn't have a feed, so I googled for 'Sinfest RSS feed' and the first result, when pasted into the 'add subscription' box, worked fine.

So now..... your turn! Try it out on my blog feed!