Subscribing to My site Via RSS

If you are interested in staying up-to-date with the latest happenings on my website without needing to check it every single day, you can receive blog updates via RSS feed. If you’re just here because you need the RSS feed link to this site, it is here:

https://shawnsorbom.net/index.php/blog/feed/

For those who do not know what RSS is, I will offer a short explanation and a tutorial on how to use it.

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or, Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS is a data format many websites use to deliver information about changes to the website through a piece of software called a news aggregator. The news aggregator in turn will notify you of any changes to your subscribed feeds every time you tell it to update them.

This approach has a couple of benefits over email-based subscription systems. First, you do not need to share your email address with me in order to receive updates. Second, using RSS instead of email-based subscription systems can significantly reduce the amount of clutter in your inbox – especially if you decide to subscribe to many sites at the same time.

In order to subscribe to any site that offers RSS, you need to download a news aggregator, and you need to find a valid RSS link to the website you wish to subscribe to.

There are many news aggregators out there to choose from, and the best part is, most of them are free! I personally use one called QuiteRSS. It is available for Windows, Macintosh (OSX) and Linux. It is available for download here.

To subscribe to my blog, right click on the following URL: https://shawnsorbom.net/index.php/blog/feed/ and select “copy link location” (or, “copy link address”) from the drop-down menu. Then open QuiteRSS and click on the green “+” sign in the upper left-hand corner of the window. When a new sub-window appears, right click on the field that says “feed URL or website address”, and select “paste” from the drop-down menu. Then click finish.

You are done!

Any time you want to get new updates from my site, you can click the orange button to the right of the + sign in QuiteRSS’s main window.

Linux users, please note: binaries for QuiteRSS on Linux are not available via the creator’s main website. However, QuiteRSS is available in the package repositories of most major Linux distributions.

Happy reading!