Keep up with SaveYourself.ca
There are several ways that you can find out about new content on SaveYourself.ca: you can subscribe to the main RSS feed, follow the skeptical salamander on Twitter, or become a fan of the Facebook page.
 | rss feed feed://SaveYourself.ca/rss.xml | Or use this button to subscribe with popular RSS readers, such as Google Reader.  |
 | twitter http://www.twitter.com/painfultweets (@painfultweets) |
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 | facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vancouver/SaveYourselfca/162432601559 |
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What is this “RSS” you speak of? An RSS primer
I publish new content on SaveYourself.ca regularly. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be notified when there’s something new to read? Without having to check the website? Or putting yourself on another mailing list?
RSS will let you do that!
This website has an “RSS feed.” An RSS feed is a special web page that summarizes content on the site. Your web browser, a RSS reading program (often called a “news reader”), or even your mail program can read that page and will automatically let you know when it has been updated, and show you only what’s new. Yay!
(RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, by the way — a distribution system.)
To learn more about RSS feeds and how to read them, here’s a tutorial for beginners Getting Started with RSS, or a fun little YouTube video (3:44):
Software to help you read RSS
You can visit an RSS feed just like a webpage, and bookmark it just like a webpage. Modern web browsers are often equipped to manage RSS feeds, and will let you know when a feed has been updated with new items. But RSS feeds are the most powerful when they are managed by “feed readers” — software that is specially designed to keep track of and present RSS feeds. There are a lot of options — too many, perhaps!
- Online: websites like feeds.reddit and Google Reader let you check all your feeds from any web browser. As usual, Google is dominating — I recommend Google Reader for the average beginner.
- Mac OS X: NetNewsWire is easy to use and powerful, and Apple’s Mail program has basic RSS reading powers.
- Windows: SharpReader is simple, but gets the job done.
Do you have your own website or blog?
If you have just a little technical knowledge of your site/blog, you can easily display my RSS feed on your website. This is good for me and good for you: Google rewards sites for having fresh content, and this is an automatic way to have fresh content. Set it up using plug-and-play PHP, provided here with instructions.