Wired for Work

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Using Feeds

Whenever you see the symbol to the left on a website it means that this website has an "RSS feed". RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". Don't let it's name put you off because RSS is a really useful tool for staying up to date with information on the web.

More and more sites now have RSS feeds, which is great because they alert you when a site has new content. This means that you don't have to keep going back to a site to see if it has changed. You can get the latest news items from numerous websites in one place, which saves you time and makes it a lot easier to stay up to date with lots of sites.

1) How do I use RSS?

The good thing about RSS is that it is pretty easy to use. Basically you need to do two things:

a) Get yourself a news reader

A news reader is a piece of software that checks the RSS feed for new items and lets you read the latest items. It is a bit like your email inbox but instead of showing you your latest emails it shows you your latest news items.

There are plenty of freely available news readers out there to use, including:

 
Google Reader (My personal favourite)
 
Bloglines
 
My Yahoo.

b) Subscribe to an RSS feed

Sites that have RSS news feeds usually have the RSS logo (shown below). Clicking on this logo lets you subscribe to that feed in your chosen reader.


The RSS Icon

When you click on the RSS feed icon one of two things will happen:


1) You will see the one click subscribe buttons (shown below). Click the button to your reader to subscribe

or


2) You will see a screen showing some code. If you a screen full of code simply copy the web address of that page (e.g. "www.samplepage.com") and in your reader look for a button such as "Add subscription" and paste the web address of the feed. (The following image is from Google Reader)




2) So how does this relate to my career again?

Good question.

You could start by following some jobs feeds. There are lots of them about (http://www.jobs.ac.uk, http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/ are some generic examples).

Exercise - Using Feeds

Part 1 - Register for Google Reader
There are many readers out there but a good one to try is Google Reader.

To register for Google reader (if you already have a google account, such as gmail then you can skip to part 2)
  1. Enter www.google.co.uk in your web browser
  2. At the top right of the screen click "Sign in"
  3. On the right, under the sign in box click "Create an account now"
  4. Fill in the relevant details.

Part 2 - Subscribe to a feed
    1. Go to http://www.jobs.ac.uk
    2. On the left of the screen click on "RSS Feeds"
    3. Click on "By Job Type"
    4. Select a job type that suits your skills and click on the the "RSS" link next to it
    5. Click on the web address (URL), right click and select copy





    6. Go to www.google.co.uk/reader and login
    7. At the top left click "Add a subscription"
    8. Click in the drop down box, right click and select "paste"
    9. Click "Add"

RSS readers such as Google reader become more useful as you add more feeds. As well as jobs sites many of the Research Councils have RSS feeds, as does www.vitae.ac.uk. There are also numerous academic related blogs that are worth subscribing to.