UPDATE: This is an out of date post. To subscribe, simply visit our blog homepage at: tobylaura.com/blog and click on the yellow subscribe button to add our blog feed.
Did you know that you can stay up-to-date with our blog without needing me to e-mail you, check our blog all the time, or even think about it? RSS, or “really simple syndication” is a common way to check on any website that has updates on it all the time. It’s like an auto-notifier for you that something has been updated. Any blog with Google or WordPress, or a news site that has a blog or updates, has RSS. You can watch for multiple blog updates all the time. When you see there is an update, head to the blog and see what’s new!
It’s really easy to set up and I’ll walk you through it, if you don’t already know how to watch RSS feeds.
When you are looking at our main blog page, with the picture of Laura and I parasailing, there is a button called RSS Subscribe. Clicking that will take you to the “feed” that gets updated whenever a blog entry is made. Once you click on the subscribe button, if you have a Mac and use Safari, on the left side of the screen, you can click on the link: Add to my mail. Automatically, you will then receive an e-mail every time a new blog entry is posted. Cool! You can also have Safari notify you every time there is a new update within the Safari browser.
If you use Windows, sell your computer and get a Mac. Just kidding. Just like in Safari, Internet Explorer, at the top right of the address bar for our blog page, will have a symbol like at the top of this blog entry. It may also be next to your Home button. Click on it while you are at our blog page. Select the feed you want (in this case, it will be our blog) and then, it will update when a new post is made. I don’t have IE 7, but updates should show up under a button called FEED, in your favorites bar. Let me know if you find out otherwise.
If you have Outlook 2007 and want the updates to show up in that e-mail program like a new e-mail, then follow these steps:
On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
In the New RSS Feed dialogue box, type in the URL of the RSS Feed. In our case, it would be:
feed://tobylaura.com/blog/feed/
Click Add.
Click Yes.
*** This paragraph is out of date and is here for historical reference only.*** If for some reason, you have any troubles subscribing to our TobyLaura blog, did you know that I mirror our TobyLaura blog with a Google blog? It’s called New Mercies and it’s address is: googleblog.tobylaura.com. It is a Google hosted blog, and when you visit it there, it has the same entries as this blog does. Once there, you can go all the way to the bottom of the blog and click Subscribe, or again, click on the symbol in your browser that appears like the one at the top of this blog entry. To set up the Google blog RSS in Outlook, just follow the same directions above, but instead, use the feed address:
feed://googleblog.tobylaura.com/feeds/posts/default
This may seem a little daunting or confusing. It really isn’t, and the best way to set up a feed (auto-notifier) is to use the help function of whatever computer system you are using. I watch several blogs, and when they are updated, they show up in my e-mail inbox as new updates. If your Outlook won’t do that, but you have Google e-mail, check out: Google Reader. It will also notify you of new postings and is really easy to set up.
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