Thursday, October 30, 2008 - How to add an RSS Feed to your My RealTown Feed Reader
This tutorial will explain what RSS is, how it is used, and how to make it work for you.
In short, RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, is an easy way to keep track of all your favorite online publications without having to visit a hundred different websites every day.
A long long time ago, you could subscribe to some websites. The website would e-mail you automatically every time there was new content added to the site. This sounds pretty neat in theory, problem is, if you subscribed to a really busy website where content is added many times a day, or if you subscribed to multiple websites, your inbox would be flooded with these e-mails. That’s when some genius came up with a solution, RSS!
An RSS feed contains a little information about the feeds you choose. Usually this is the title of the feed, the website it belongs to, the latest website updates, and sometimes, a description or full contents of the article(s) and the date the item was added.
As a user of RSS, you don’t need to know any of its history or how it works. The part you need to know about is actually Really Simple…
The first thing you need to harness the power of RSS is a Feed Reader. Most NEW web browsers and e-mail clients have a feed reader built in… but RealTown also provides a pretty powerful reader for its members accessible via your My RealTown home page. We think your My RealTown home page is a great place to start your day, if you do to, make it your home page!
The first step here is to go to http://RealTown.com and login (if you aren’t logged in already). Click the Member Login link in the upper right corner of the screen. Input your username or e-mail address and password. Note the Remember Me checkbox. If you don’t want to have to login the next time you visit RealTown, make sure you check this box. When you are done, click Login.
You will automatically be brought to your My RealTown home page, but if you aren’t, or you were already logged in, simply click the My RealTown button in the upper right corner of the screen.
This big box in the middle of the screen is your My RealTown Feeds. This is where you can subscribe or unsubscribe to any RSS feed you’d like. We have pre-filled a few for you, RealTown News, RISMedia, User and Friend Feeds, and others. To get a feel for how it works, select RIS Media. You will see all of the most current RIS Media News Article Headlines, newest on top. If the title seems like something you’d like to read, just click the title, and I will be brought directly to that article on it’s original website.
So how do you do it?!
Well, Any time you see an orange icon like this:  (sometimes they are slightly different) next to a link that says ‘RSS Feed’ that means there is a feed available for the site you are on. This icon is pretty much standard. Most websites that offer an RSS Feed will have this icon available somewhere on its site. For this tutorial, lets find a real world example.
Lets go to http://Time.com; Time Magazines website. Basically, when we get to Time.com we have to search for the little orange icon, and/or the words RSS Feed…. On this particular website, you'll find it, at the very bottom of the screen.
In this case, clicking the link will bring us to a page where we can choose what feed(s) we want.
Pick a topic you are interested in, then click the Subscribe link. You will be brought to a page that looks like this:
Since RealTown isn't listed in the list of feed reader software, you'll need to use the link above that reads [view xml]. Right click on that link, and choose Copy Shortcut (if you are using Firefox, the link will read copy link location). This copies the URL to your clip board so we can go back to RealTown (or whichever feed reader you prefer) and add the feed.
Next, we go back the My RealTown page and click +Add a Feed (within the Feed Reader window). In the first field: Feed Address, input the URL you just copied by holding the “Control” button and pressing "V", or you can right click in the field and choose ‘Paste’. Name the feed anything you like, something that will tell you what feed this is or where it is from. Since I chose TIME Top Stories, that’s what I will title it. When you are finished, click ‘Add Feed’. The page will refresh and you will see confirmation if everything was done correctly. You will also see that "TIME Top Stories" (or whatever you titled your new feed) will appear at the bottom of your Custom Feeds. If you click on the title, you will see the titles of the most recent headlines. If you see something you want to read, simply click the title (or right click and open in new tab or window) and you will be taken directly to that article.
Pretty neat huh? Once in a while I have a hard time finding a feed to a website I like to read. Sometimes it is because they don’t offer feeds, but sometimes the feeds are just hidden. If I can’t find the feed on their website, I’ll go to Google, and search for something like “People Magazine RSS Feed”. This will usually bring up the RSS Feed for the particular news site you are looking for so long as it is offered.
Let’s go back to the feed reader. If you ever want to unsubscribe from this feed, simply select the feed, then click the unsubscribe link below the feed titles.
If you ever want to see more than the 10 newest articles, click the ‘Visit Website’ button. You will be taken directly to the source of this feed and more than likely you’ll be able to browse through their older articles.
Most sections of RealTown.com also offer RSS feeds. There is a feed for our articles, there are feeds available on most blogs (it is up to the blog owner to allow or not allow the feed to be turned on), groups, and our communities.
Let’s try adding the feed for a blog. If there is a particular blog you enjoy reading on RealTown, go to it. For this example I will visit Saul Klein’s blog. Same process here, we are looking for the RSS icon and/or the words “RSS Feed”.
Here it is, toward the bottom left side of the screen. We right click on the icon and choose ‘copy shortcut’, then we go back to our feed reader, click ‘+Add RSS Feed’, name the feed, paste in the URL, and click ‘Add Feed’. We now have two custom feeds!
RealTown allows you to add up to 100 custom feeds, so don’t hesitate to add them. Remember, you don’t have to read all these articles every day, you don’t even have to browse the headlines for each source, this is just an easier way for you to access several news websites faster. This is just one of the many useful tools we offer you here at RealTown—FOR FREE! So, start your day here at RealTown—THE Real Estate Network.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? E-Mail our Customer Service Team at CustomerService@RealTown.com
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