Hello Everyone,

Recently I have spoken to a few readers of my blog who asked me if there was a way that they could be automatically informed when a new article is posted. Many of you may be new to blogs, which are generally broadcast via the internet by a mechanism called an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. The nice thing about RSS feeds is that once you setup an RSS reader in your browser, the new content automatically gets pushed to you. All you need to do is check your browser for updates. In this post, I’ll show you how to use the most popular RSS readers to subscribe to my blog.

If you look at the upper left corner on this blog’s web page http://synopsysoc.org/analoginsights/ you will see a set of buttons that you can use to subscribe to our RSS feed. My favorite way to read blogs is through My Yahoo! Pages, so I’ll start by showing an example of that. One of my favorite features of My Yahoo! is that they let you create as many tabbed pages as you want with your customized content. I have a My Yahoo! page just for my AMS and EDA-related RSS feeds. All you need is a Yahoo account.

The screen shot above shows what happens if you are logged into your Yahoo account, and you click on this button:

Once you select “Keep It”, you can return to you’re My Yahoo! Page at any time, and you will see the headline for new posts, and the indication of how long ago they were posted.

Many of you may have Google accounts for email, or be users of the Google homepage. If you select this button: Google presents you with two options for reading my blog:

 

If you select “Add to Google homepage”, it is very similar to My Yahoo!, except they don’t show you any information on the age of the posts:

 

 

You can also select “Add to Google Reader”, which creates a separate page where you can directly read any blog, or click to go to the blog site if you choose. The list view in the Google reader shows the date of posts, and highlights those that are unread in bold. The “Expanded view” lets you read the blog directly, while the right arrow next to each post goes to the blog site.

 

 

Finally, here is one more easy way to keep track of blog updates if you are a Firefox user. Firefox has a feature called “Live Bookmarks”. If you look at this blog in Firefox, you will notice the RSS icon alongside the URL:

 

 

If you click on that icon, Firefox responds by asking if you want to save a bookmark:

 

Now you can see a list of the blog posts simply by looking at your bookmarks.How do you read my blog? Do you go directly to the blog site? Let me know if I can help make it easier for you to read and stay up to date.

-Mike

blog readers RSS My Yahoo! Google Live Bookmarks Firefox