Getting Started With RSS

Organize Your Feeds
As you add more feeds, you'll find your feeds list getting more and more unwieldy. You've got general news, tech blogs, politics, humor, sports, and who knows what else all in one big list. It's time to get organized.

Click the plus sign to the left of a folder to see all the feeds within that folder. If you want to see the items from a single feed in your main window, click on the feed name. If you want to see all the items from all the feeds within that folder, click on the folder name.

You can also change the order your feeds appear in the feeds list by selecting the Reorder/Sort link to the right of the Edit link. Have them appear in alphabetical order or its reverse, put the feed with the largest number of unread items first, or sort your feeds by date. When you're done, click Finished.

Customize Your Feeds
Still not satisfied with how your feeds are appearing? We're not done yet. Bloglines and other powerful news readers let you control the behavior of your feeds.

Click the Options link to the right of the Reorder/Sort link. Here you can control whether articles you click on will appear in your current browser window, a new window, or the same new window over and over. You can have folders in your feeds list open by default or closed until you open them, you can have newer items appear before older items or vice versa, and you can choose to display entire postings, headlines and summaries, or just headlines.

Finally, you can have all your feeds always appear in your feeds list, or you can have feeds appear only if they contain new items. Click the Save Changes button when you're done.

Incidentally, many of the options you see when you initially subscribe to a feed (the ones we ignored earlier) are related to the organization and customization features we just learned about. Next time you subscribe to a feed, you can put the feed into an existing or new folder and control how it appears on the page.

Export/Import Feeds
Thinking about trying a different RSS reader? If you already have a good list of feeds, most readers let you export your subscriptions to an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) file, then import that file into the new RSS reader to subscribe to those same feeds. If you're exporting from Bloglines:

Now your OPML file is ready to be imported into the new RSS reader. If you're importing to Bloglines:

If you're just getting started with RSS and you know someone who has a great list of subscriptions, you can use this same method to import their entire subscription list.

In fact, we've prepared a couple of OPML files for you to download. Right-click each file and select Save Link As (or Save Target As) from the pop-up menu to save the file to your computer. Then follow the steps above to import the file.

Valerie Potter is Features Editor for the TechWeb Pipelines.