Making Life Simpler with RSS

For many of us, checking our favorite online news sources has become as much a staple of our morning routine as that strong cup of coffee. Although many of our frequently visited sites are easily accessible from our past browsing history or stored in our internet browser Favorites, RSS feeds, short for Real Simple Syndication, eliminate the need for us to navigate to multiple sites in order to get our fix.

The key to managing your RSS feeds is setting yourself up with a good reader. Google Reader is a great tool (and a personal favorite) to easily keep up with all your favorite blogs, but there are also a number of other subscription services available. These services pull the latest news and updates from all your favorite sites directly into one page, making information easy to manage. Once again, the folks at CommonCraft have another great video that sums it up in less than four minutes and provides a step-by-step how to set up your RSS feeds.

Although a little dated, this piece from Tech Soup gives ten solid reasons why the non-profit world should be using RSS feeds. The No. 1 reason on TechSoup’s Top Ten is top for a reason: RSS makes the web easier to read – saving all of us time. And of course, if your organization has a blog, having an RSS feed available to your readers, is critical if you want to get your site noticed and build some buzz on the Web.

You can get started by setting up an RSS feed of NeighborWorks news.