How To Efficiently Surf The Web From One Site

Do you know what the symbol pictured above represents? If not, then please continue reading. 

If you are like me, you find yourself visiting (more or less) the same websites on a daily basis. This is a time-consuming task. First, I have to remember all the sites I visit. Then I have to remember their url (that's the "web address that starts with "http://www."). Then I have to type it in. (If I'm slightly tech-oriented, I've added all my favorite sites into the "favorites" menu of my browser so I don't have to constantly re-type the url's.

Once the site loads onto my browser, I have to re-familiarize the site and look to places where the site adds new articles. This requires a lot of brain-power and often times makes web surfing prohibitively time/energy consuming. At this stage, some people decide the internet doesn't suit them. Alas, there is a web app called a "rss feed reader" that dramatically simplifies the web surfing process. I'd like to explain how feed readers work and how they can simplify your life.

Before, I start, though, I need to distinguish the term "feed reader" from "feed aggregator." A feed reader is "you facing" because you create it solely for your benefit. An feed aggregator is "them facing" because you create if for the benefit of others. Some examples of "feed aggregators" include The Huffington Post , The Drudge Report and Lawton's shared articles. The site creator has chosen specific articles to post their site because they think visitors will be particularly interested in them. For example, I choose articles for my feed aggregator that I think will interest folks who follow the Pittsburgh real estate market. Now that I've distinguished the terms, I'm going to explain how to create a feed reader.

The first thing you have to do is choose a particular brand of reader. There are many to choose from, including Google Reader, NewsGator. For a comprehensive list of available readers, click here. If you have read my previous emails, you know I'm a Google fan. So it should come as no surprise that I use Google's Reader. In order to start using Google Reader, you have to register with Google to obtain a username and password. Once you log in, creating a reader for yourself is easy.

The next thing you have to do is choose which "feeds" you want to include in your reader. What is a "feed" anyway. A "feed" is the web content (like an article or story) organized chronologically for the purpose of sharing with others. For a more detailed explanation, click here.

In order to use a feed reader, you must be able to perform this simple task: find a site (or from within a particular site - a columnist or column) that you regularly follow and then find the url for the site's feed and paste it into your feed reader. For example, here are the feed indices for espn , cnn and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Each of these pages looks slightly different, but don't get frustrated! Just find the url: on the cnn page, it's found under the "Copy Urls to RSS" column; on the Tribune-Review site, you have to place your mouse over the orange "RSS" button and then right-click and "copy the link location:' and on the ESPN page, you have to place your mouse over the column  title or columnist's name and then right-click and "copy the link location." Once you've copied the feed url, next go to your feed reader.  

In Google Reader, there is a box at the top of the page entitled "Add A Subscription" Paste your feed url into this box and then click "add" and you will have successfully loaded your first feed url. Once you've completed this task, your Google Reader will immediately start loading the articles.

You should be able to find feed url's for your favorite sites, columns and columnists.

Here are a couple of feed url's that I recommend (just copy and paste them into your reader):

Weather Channel 15090 feed: feed://rss.weather.com/weather/rss/local/15090?cm_ven=LWO&cm_cat=rss&par=LWO_rss

Achieve Realty Blog feed: http://www.achieverealty.net/blog/feed

Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS(R) Blog feed:

http://blog.parealtor.org/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=%7B1C13EAF5-B3F9-4919-8897-F43295CC2D52%7D

Bloodhoud Blog: http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?feed=rss2